eSociety: Discovering Humanity in the Digital

By way of comedy, current events, libraries share special community interest content in the hopes of keeping their patrons connected & informed. Here you will find some examples of how libraries use social media content to inspire & inform their local communities. Comedy The Himmel Park Library uses humor and familiar library features to create funny videos & memes that are immediately relevant to the local community! On the left, you see a gif that staff created of froggy's emergency surgery. Froggy is a resident stuffed frog at the library, and is a friend & regular feature to just about everyone that walks through the library's doors. By keeping us op to date on froggy's condition in this hilarious manner, this kind of content makes viewers feel involved and invested in that location and the community it creates. Froggy is not the only stuffed resident of the library that patrons can befriend and keep up with on Facebook - a whole fleet of bunnies...

Need book recommendations? Join me for this week's #AskALibrarian ! pic.twitter.com/JlQDgzMhLY — Lauren Stoolfire (@SunSoar25) March 15, 2018 As is the case with many organizations that have social media accounts, libraries have become more accessible to the public in many ways due to their increased online presence. For libraries that use twitter, one amazing kind of immediate customer service that occurs is through #AskALibrarian. Patrons can tweet at the library using this hashtag to get a response. People ask for book recommendations; library hours, services and policies; and even guidance for bookish gifts! Need a good read? Just dm or tweet your librarian! When They Call You A Terrorist by Patrisse Khan-Cullors and asha bandele and This Will Be My Undoing speak to a specific social justice issue #askalibrarian https://t.co/0bILuE4JNh — Pima County Public Library (@pimalibrary) February 22, 2018 It's not a direct correlation, but A Princess in Theory b...

Many public libraries have Youtube channels that serve a variety of functions and have diverse content. One such kind of content you can find on library channels is youth project content - where young patrons are encouraged to express themselves and learn how to make and share videos using the library. Here are a few great examples of these videos from different public library systems: Pima County Public Library The New York Public Library The Kansas City Public Library While this kind of content is by no means professional or polished to fit library branding, it still creates an atmosphere of acceptance and inclusion. By letting youth use library services and resources to create content like this, these libraries are telling young people that their voices matter, and that their ideas are worth sharing. I had hoped that I would find more content like this when looking through the Youtube channels of various public libraries, but it was actually quite rare for a l...