The social scholar

Whoops. I forgot to post for a while...

I've settled on a topic for my dissertation and have started giving talks about my research. I'm calling it "social scholarship", but it could be digital scholarship, or networked participatory scholarship, or even open scholarship. It's about how researchers use social media during the research process: from conceptualisation of the idea for research to dissemination of the research output.

Here are the slides:

Social scholarship from neen01

Thoughts on social scholarship

My assignment this week was to examine social scholarship. There seems to be a number of terms for social scholarship, including open scholarship and digital scholarship. The definition I found most helpful was this one from Veletsianos and Kimmons:

“the open scholar is someone who makes their intellectual projects and processes digitally visible and who invites and encourages ongoing criticism of their work and secondary uses of any or all parts of it – at any stage of its development.”

We were asked to explore the use of social media tools by researchers, academics or scholars - whatever you want to call them - to disseminate or enhance their research and to aid in the research process. 

It was interesting looking at the various tools that are used by researchers. Many use the common ones - Academia.edu, or LinkedIn - but what was more interesting for me was the use of tools like Twitter, Scoop.it, Slideshare and blogging. One of the common threads in the literature on this topic is the use of these tools for crowdsourcing of research and to discuss the research process - as Veletsianos and Kimmons put it: inviting ongoing criticism...at any stage of development. And yet what I found (in my tiny, unscientific study) was that the researchers I looked at didn't use the tools for this purpose. For them, it was more about getting the word out about their research output, enhancing their reputation, and gaining more citations. 

I'd be keen to do a proper study of what's going on at my University in this regard. One of the researchers I interviewed believes that the potential for the use of social media tools in research is enormous and that it has already changed scholarship.

The other area we investigated was the role librarians can play in supporting the use of social media by researchers. I can think of two main roles: training in and promotion of different tools. Are there any others you can think of?

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.

Pinterest for Special Collections

I'm doing my Master's at the moment and one of our assignments this week has been to blog about two social media tools that we'd like to use in our Library. Here are my thoughts on Pinterest:

I have, for a while, been interested in the potential of Pinterest as a social networking tool for academic libraries. A fairly new platform (it was started as an invitation-only site in 2010), CNN reported last year that it was the third most visited site in the US. Briefly, Pinterest is an online board onto which users can “pin” interesting images and/or links.

There are various ways that academic libraries can use this tool. It has visual appeal and lends itself to activities such as advertising new books by pinning images of book covers, as well as announcing events in the Library by pinning images of posters.

The potential use of Pinterest that most interests me though, is that of creating a historical image collection. Many academic libraries these days have digital repositories where they curate and collate their digital Special Collections. Pinterest allows one to create an online collection of historical images outside of this repository. The benefit of this would be that information such as this is pushed out to Library patrons, where they are and using the tools with which they are familiar.  

See, for example, what Southwestern University in Texas is doing with their Pinterest Board to promote Special Collections.