When I first started IN506: Social Media for Information Professionals, I had a few ideas in mind of what I wanted to get out of completing the subject. I hoped to learn how social networking can be used to enhance my professional practice and I wanted to be able to engage more confidently and meaningfully with a wider community of like-minded professionals in my field. Additionally, I wanted to gain a better understanding of the impacts, benefits, limitations, and pitfalls of using social media in order to become a better collaborator and communicator in my school community.

I quickly realised that I had quite a naïve understanding of social media and the complexities of working in a socially networked world. I set out to define precisely what social media is and can now state that it involves the use of dedicated websites, applications, and social platforms to locate and interact with other social media users, with similar interests to my own (Lexico, 2020). I had used social media in this way having briefly dabbled with social networking for my own purposes but as I began my studies I started to explore a broad range of social media platforms, becoming familiar with their features and thinking about how I might be able to use them in a professional capacity.

I can now say with confidence that the use of social media can enhance my professional practice by affording opportunities to interact, collaborate, and share information among colleagues, organisations, and other relevant parties that are connected to any work-related activity or issue. It allows me to connect with other professionals on a local, regional, national or global level. In this way, professional social networking gives me greater reach and access to a wider professional community to enhance collaboration and sharing of knowledge and ideas beyond my school community.

This understanding ultimately led me to thinking about the enormous reach and influence social media platforms have and how I can leverage it to promote and provide information about the school library in which I work. This new perspective ran almost concurrently with Module 2 (Information and society) and Module 3 (Social media in your organisation) as I began to explore the online presence of other organisations.

In my blog post about the client experience I compared the online presence of three organisations and in doing so I focused on what I believe to be the key elements in creating a good professional social media presence; a user-friendly and navigable site, relevant and up-to-date information, and community building. I took particular interest in the community building aspect of social media (Gruss et al., 2020) and learned that engaging users is important as they can make suggestions to improve library services and aid in promoting services and events by sharing and re-posting information.

Whilst completing my first assessment I also learned the importance of strategic content creation, and how to curate and share information that resonates with users. I dived head-first into Instagram and became slightly obsessed with the creative and innovative ways I could take advantage of one of the most commonly used social platforms (Manca, 2020; O’Donnell, 2023, p. 57). Additionally, I hadn’t thought to use social media as a tool for analytics as discussed by Alfonzo (2019). This was an eye-opening moment as I could start seeing social networking as a tool that can be used to help make strategic decisions about the management of the library, the collections, and services that we provide. Through my engagement with Instagram I came to believe that understanding the preferences and needs of the users is essential for creating effective social media content. Also, active participation and responsiveness when managing a social media account is crucial in developing interaction and engagement from users in order to cultivate a vibrant online community.

Thinking about online communities led me to another key learning moment as I began considering how I was developing myself as an information professional and cultivating a personal learning network (PLN). Through Utecht’s five stages of PLN adoption (2008), I was able to identify that I was in the early stages of developing a PLN but also that it was important to actively do so. The importance of PLN adoption was shared and discussed among my peers here, here, and here. The potential to connect with other librarians is transformative. I’ve learnt that developing a PLN is potentially a continuous process. I identify with McKenzie as she questions whether she needs to re-enter the immerse stage of PLN adoption to discover new resources and fresh perspectives (2023), and I also add that re-visiting prior stages might be necessary as technologies and social platforms may come and go. It seems that there will always be a new platform waiting just around the corner to take the world by storm and information professionals would be wise to keep immersing themselves in new ways to keep connected. Suffice to say, as I strengthen my reach and access to a wider professional community, enhance collaboration, and share knowledge and ideas I feel I am becoming a better library practitioner.

Finally, one of the other key learning moments occurred when I was exploring information and digital literacy as an area of concern on my blog, which I again revisited in my extended blog post on social media and misinformation. As a library professional working in an education setting, I believe it is crucial that we teach evaluate skills that enable students to critically assess and use information in meaningful and ethical ways. This seemed to be a popular topic among my peers. When questioned whether we would one day have technology to combat phenomena such as ‘fake news’, I responded that instead we should probably question if we will have the necessary skills to identify fake news in the first place. Ensuring young people are developing the skills that will allow them to decipher the accuracy and reliability of digital information and navigate the information landscape is paramount and this became more and more clear as I delved into the challenges of addressing “information disorder” (Damasceno, 2021). Fact checking, verification of sources, and critical evaluation of information are essential skills that must be honed if we are to live and work successfully as twenty-first century citizens and users of information in online environments.

 

References

Alfonzo, P. (2019). Chapter 4: Instagram in the Library. Library Technology Reports, 55(2), 33–42.

 

Damasceno, C. S. (2021). Multiliteracies for Combating Information Disorder and Fostering Civic Dialogue. Social Media + Society, 7(1), 205630512098444. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305120984444

 

Gruss, R., Abrahams, A., Song, Y., Berry, D., & Al-Daihani, S. M. (2020). Community building as an effective user engagement strategy: A case study in academic libraries. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 71(2), 208-220. doi:10.1002/asi.24218

 

Lexico. (2020). Social Networking: Meaning of Social Networking. https://www.lexico.com/definition/social_networking

 

Manca, S. (2020). Snapping, pinning, liking or texting: Investigating social media in higher education beyond Facebook. The Internet and Higher Education, 44. https://doi-org/10.1016/j.iheduc.2019.100707 

 

McKenzie, J. (2023, May 22). Do I have a personal learning network? [Blog post]. Reflections on Social Media and Libraries. Retrieved from https://thinkspace.csu.edu.au/inf506janet/2023/05/22/do-i-have-a-personal-learning-network/

 

O’Donnell, R. (2023). Digital 2023 Australia: 1 in 3 Australians use social networks for brand research. We Are Social. https://wearesocial.com/au/blog/2023/02/digital-2023-australia-1-in-3-australians-use-social-networks-for-brand-research/

 

Utecht, J. (2008, April 3). Stages of PLN adoption. The Thinking Stick. https://www.thethinkingstick.com/stages-of-pln-adoption/