Customer service at your fingertips? #AskALibrarian


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!




Not sure about what goes on at the library or what they can help you with? Just ask.



Even if it seems a bit obscure, the library might just be able to help you get a gift too.




While in most cases this is all-around awesome for patrons and staff alike who get to interact this way, the question becomes - where do you draw the line? When should the #askalibrarian service ever not respond, or be concerned about a post? Especially on twitter, there's plenty of sarcasm and strangeness to go around, so public institutions like libraries still sometimes have to be careful about what they say, and how they say it. Take the following interaction:

That response could have gone wrong in numerous ways, but the staff member for that library system did an excellent job of making the interaction a positive one. When it comes down to questionable statements and messages being sent to the library, there's no one way to handle it, and each library's social media team will need to address these events when they occur, taking their context and potential consequences into consideration, and doing their best to be a positive accepting presence online.

So when it comes down to it, you can now (as before) as the library whatever question you want. Now, however, since libraries have made themselves on social media they have opened to door for every question under the sun at any time. While this is certainly a presentation of values-based service extending over into the digital realm, it is important for libraries to know what they're doing on social media and have a well-trained staff before they dive into using twitter for customer service and interaction. So far, it's looking good for the librarians!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Bullshit in Twitter and Politics

Image
Tweets have become a political tool of expression, information, and argumentation. While in some cases this is intentional, in the interesting and controversial case of Donal Trump, tweets may just be bullshit. According to Harry Frankfurt, bullshit is everywhere. Everyday we slog through mountains of the epistemically disgusting stuff. But what does bullshit made digital look like? One potential example which receives quite a lot of air time may be President Donald Trump's Twitter feed. The Trump presidency and campaign are in and of themselves controversial, however those are not the subject of this piece. We will be focusing on the nature of content that comes from this source, how it qualifies as bullshit, and on the epistemic implications of this. This exploration will solely discuss the quality of this source of information, and how its content impacts others. The inconsistency that can be found in Donald Trump's tweets is certainly not new; as Stephen Colbert expre
Read more