Welcome back to Season Five of Linking Our Libraries!

We are the Central Minnesota Libraries Exchange. Our members are libraries of all sorts: public, schools, academics, special libraries, archives, and history centers. This season we are talking through some skills that people in any kind of library will need to be successful in their work.

This week we will be talking about Social Media in your library, and how to make it work for you.

We welcome back returning Guest Host Jessie Storlien, from the Stearns History Museum, to help us get some ideas!

The Basics:

Social media is fun! Social media is informative! Social media is a snake pit of danger! Yes, it’s all these things at once. Developing some good social media practices in your library will help to keep you on the more positive side of social media work. So, while it’s good to remember that things you say will be remembered online, and even innocent gaffs can be turned into PR disasters – that’s probably not every day, or possibly not ever for you. Use social media tools as you would anything else that is powerful: carefully, and with plans for keeping everyone safe and happy.

So, what do we mean by social media? They are the tools we can use to share information: words, pictures, messages.  These tools change fairly often, but of course you know the big ones: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. You can include LinkedIn, Snapchat, and many other tools.

These can be so handy for sharing information – you can reach out to where your patrons are to deliver messages, share information, promote programs and materials, and anything else. Your work in a library is to share information; social media tools can be an easy way to do that. This is part of your job, to connect people to your information. And social media can be a useful way to make that happen.

What are some strategies you can use to make social media a success in your library? We have a few ideas:

• Share new materials in your library. It’s a quick way to let people know about things they may want – especially if you add a link to add it to their holds.
• Talk about programs. It’s always good to get more people interested in your work. Even if they can not make it to one program, knowing that your library is actively doing interesting things will help them to understand your work.
• Post pictures of displays. Sharing pictures of the materials you are promoting. You might encourage people to come in and grab something that catches their eye.
• Share information about holidays, anniversaries, and other information that might be interesting to your community. Even if it does not relate directly to your library, information relevant to your community is good to share.
• Make your messages both positive and accurate. There is plenty of negativity online, and plenty of misinformation or just plain lies floating around social media. Make a focused effort to not contribute to either.
• Advocate for your library, for library issues, and for your parent organization – school, city, hospital – whatever.
• Talk to someone in your parent organization to be sure you know any rules they have about social media, and follow them in addition to rules you set up in your library.

Now that we have some basic ideas about social media, let’s talk with Jessie about using social media tools in a real library environment!

Additional Resources:

• To Engage or Not to Engage? Social Media in Public Libraries (This is written by our own Karen Pundsack, from Great River Library System. She will be with us next week to talk about Policies and Procedures.)
• 10 Social Media Marketing Tips for Libraries
• Use of Social Media in the Library
• From the ALA: Social Media Guidelines for Public and Academic Libraries
• From Taylor and Francis: How are libraries using social media to the advantage of their institutions?
• A webinar: Getting Started with Social Media for Your Library (there is a lot of information here to go with the recording)
• Ten Tips to Master Social Media at Your Library

Books Read

We like to read books! Here are the books we shared in this episode. All info is from Amazon, and the links go back there. If you click on one, and buy either the book or other stuff, Jeff Bezos will give us a small share of the profits he makes on the sale. Thanks, in advance, for supporting us!!

Vera’s spent her whole life secretly in love with her best friend, Charlie Kahn. And over the years she’s kept a lot of his secrets. Even after he betrayed her. Even after he ruined everything.

So when Charlie dies in dark circumstances, Vera knows a lot more than anyone—the kids at school, his family, even the police. But will she emerge to clear his name? Does she even want to?

Edgy and gripping, Please Ignore Vera Dietz is an unforgettable novel: smart, funny, dramatic, and always surprising.

Sue Monk Kidd has touched millions of readers with her novels The Secret Life of Bees and The Mermaid Chair and with her acclaimed nonfiction. In this intimate dual memoir, she and her daughter, Ann, offer distinct perspectives as a fifty-something and a twenty-something, each on a quest to redefine herself and to rediscover each other.

Between 1998 and 2000, Sue and Ann travel throughout Greece and France. Sue, coming to grips with aging, caught in a creative vacuum, longing to reconnect with her grown daughter, struggles to enlarge a vision of swarming bees into a novel. Ann, just graduated from college, heartbroken and benumbed by the classic question about what to do with her life, grapples with a painful depression. As this modern-day Demeter and Persephone chronicle the richly symbolic and personal meaning of an array of inspiring figures and sites, they also each give voice to that most protean of connections: the bond of mother and daughter.

A wise and involving book about feminine thresholds, spiritual growth, and renewal, Traveling with Pomegranates is both a revealing self-portrait by a beloved author and her daughter, a writer in the making, and a momentous story that will resonate with women everywhere.

If you’ve ever laughed your way through David Sedaris’s cheerfully misanthropic stories, you might think you know what you’re getting with Calypso. You’d be wrong.

When he buys a beach house on the Carolina coast, Sedaris envisions long, relaxing vacations spent playing board games and lounging in the sun with those he loves most. And life at the Sea Section, as he names the vacation home, is exactly as idyllic as he imagined, except for one tiny, vexing realization: it’s impossible to take a vacation from yourself.

With Calypso, Sedaris sets his formidable powers of observation toward middle age and mortality. Make no mistake: these stories are very, very funny–it’s a book that can make you laugh ’til you snort, the way only family can. Sedaris’s powers of observation have never been sharper, and his ability to shock readers into laughter unparalleled. But much of the comedy here is born out of that vertiginous moment when your own body betrays you and you realize that the story of your life is made up of more past than future.

This is beach reading for people who detest beaches, required reading for those who loathe small talk and love a good tumor joke. Calypso is simultaneously Sedaris’s darkest and warmest book yet–and it just might be his very best.

Conclusion

Thanks to Jessie for coming in to work through this topic with us! Be sure you are subscribed to this podcast to get all the library skills directly to your favorite app each week. And you can check out our shownotes for each episode to get all the info we discussed, along with the links to more resources. Every episode we have created is on our website: cmle.org.

If you want to enjoy our book group podcast, subscribe to Reading With Libraries.  

Thanks for joining us this week! And check back in with us next week for another library competency!