Digital Public Library of America Service Hub Social Media Usage Analysis

Lynch, Joshua D.

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/104610 Copy

Description

Title

Digital Public Library of America Service Hub Social Media Usage Analysis

Author(s)

Lynch, Joshua D.

Issue Date

2019-07

Keyword(s)

• Digital Public Library of America
• Illinois Digitial Heritage Hub
• social media
• DPLA
• IDHH
• Facebook
• Twitter
• Instagram
• Pinterest
• Tumblr
• Flickr
• outreach
• digital collections
• digital libraries

Geographic Coverage

Illinois; United States

Abstract

This paper examines the social media of a number of organizations that contribute records to the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), known as hubs, in order to see if there are any trends or common strategies that hubs deployed in social media that may reveal new information about social media usage, digital collections promotion, and/ or outreach by organizations involved in a national distributed digital library. Twitter is the most popular choice among social media platforms with 19 of 27 hubs surveyed actively or formerly tweeting. Facebook is second with 15 active accounts. Other platforms used by hubs include Tumblr, Instagram, Pinterest, and Flickr, though only a handful or hubs rely on these platforms. Content generally does not vary significantly across the several social media accounts; most hubs with multiple social media accounts share the same general content in each platform on or around the same date and time with minor tweaks appropriate to the specific platform (such as shortened versions of text in Facebook posts for Tweets in order to adhere to Twitter’s strict character limits). Most social media feeds received a good deal of interaction from users, in the form of likes, retweets, shares, re-pins, reblogs, etc. but very few consistently sparked comments by users and even fewer saw interactions among users or users and staff. While service hubs are primarily concerned with digital object metadata aggregation, most of their social media accounts demonstrate that digital object sharing is only a part of their content and priorities. Only Tumblr, Pinterest, and Flickr accounts are consistently devoted to almost entirely digital object or collection sharing. Other social media accounts are dedicated to this and other content, such as sharing information useful to hub providers or users, promotion of events, projects, or products, posts based around exigent events such as holidays or important moments in history, or posts purely for entertainment.

Type of Resource

text

Language

en

Permalink

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/104610

Copyright and License Information

Digital Public Library of America Service Hub Social Media Usage Analysis by Joshua Lynch is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

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