Are librarians partners in research?

In a post I published in February this year, I asked whether librarians are indeed partners in research. I didn't get any responses, which either means my blog isn't read, or other librarians are also not quite sure where we stand on this topic.

I'm writing an assignment this week on digital scholarship and came across this interesting talk by Martin Weller. 

I found it telling that he refers to librarians and research assistants in the same breath: as "people who do stuff for you". 

So maybe we're not seen as partners in research yet. 

Social media: things to ponder

I'm part of a social media working group here at my library. What that means is we manage, monitor and update the various social media accounts for the library. The use of social media in our library started as an experiment. Because of bandwidth issues in South Africa, the use of social media on campus was restricted for many years. At the time we started, we had to create our accounts "under the radar", and advertising the fact that we were on these platforms via our web site was forbidden.

The reason we went the route of social media is because we believed that what we had to say about the library would be better distributed via social media rather than just via our web site. We chose Facebook and Twitter initially and just recently, we've started using YouTube as well for distribution of training and promotional videos.

Here's what I've learned so far and issues I'm still grappling with:

- The management of social media for an organisation can't be an ad hoc thing. We've become more coordinated in our efforts to push information out to our students and it seems to be working.

- Success on social media means different things to different people. Do we want tons of followers? Do we measure success by the amount of interaction we get from our readers? I think success should be measured by the amount of interaction with and relevant messages we create for our followers. Are we speaking to their needs? Are they following us because they get what they want via these media?

- Librarians tend to be tentative about having a voice. This has been a bug-bear of mine for a while. South African library bloggers, for example, tend to curate information and quote sources, rather than comment on issues. I believe social media lends itself to and demands personalisation. Followers aren't interested in "party line", generic messages. They want to know who we are, to feel that they are interacting with human beings and to have some fun in the process. Our accounts have slowly evolved from impersonal message-driven platforms to conversational yet informative sources, but we still have a long way to go.

- Twitter seems to be more popular amongst our population than Facebook. I'm not sure whether that is because of the different ways we use the two accounts, but it's worth studying. This week, we invited social media guru, Dave Duarte, to speak to us about the management of our accounts, and one of the things he mentioned was that, for example, nostalgia works very well on Facebook, while current, fresh information is key on Twitter.

- Social media demands 24/7 management. What does this mean for librarians, who don't work 24/7? What if someone contacts us at midnight for help with their assignment? Making it policy that we interact with someone at this time is risky and not everyone will be on board, for obvious reasons.

How difficult is this really?

"This might sound like a condescending question," [WARNING BELLS!] "but how difficult is this really?"

Students, eh? So much arrogance, so little life experience.

The question was asked of me by a student to whom I'm teaching Digitisation. Digitisation is an odd thing to teach. You have to mix theoretical concepts with practical stuff like how to create a .tiff file. And you have to assume no one knows what a .tiff file is. So you get those students who think that what you're teaching them is boring and obvious.

Well, of course it's boring and obvious. Mostly. But what I said in reply was this:

"Yes, it's not difficult. Pushing a button on the scanner is easy. Filing images is easy. The exciting part is knowing you're part of something bigger. Knowing that you're creating a repository that is making the academic output of your institution visible to the world. Sitting down with an academic who has a collection of slides never seen before and knowing that making them available digitally will change the way research in that area will be conducted. Listening to a photographer tell you about the collection of photographs he's donating to your archive, knowing that this is his opportunity for his work to be seen all over the world. A monkey could do the scanning part. But it's not difficult to find the excitement in digitisation."