Exercise 10: Evaluation

How Hurstville Library, Museum and Gallery uses 2.0 Technologies

Unfortunately, I was unable to find many examples of use of social media on the Kogarah Library website. I decided to use Hurstville Library, Museum and Gallery for this exercise instead, as it is in my local area and I both borrow from and volunteer there.

Information about Hurstville LMG’s use of social media can be found in their social media contributor’s agreement. Here is a brief summary of some of the main points:

• Social media is used by Hurstville LMG to promote its services and programs and to encourage healthy debate within the community about “topics of cultural interest.”

•  Hurstville LMG tracks trends in community opinion and uses this information to decide how its social media platforms will change and evolve.

•  Content submitted to Hurstville LMG’s social media sites operates under a Creative Commons license (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike). 

Here are some examples of how Hurstville Library uses social media:

Blog

Hurstville LMG’s blog is divided up into ten main search categories: what’s on, exhibitions, collections, reviews, kids, youth, seniors, history, fun and news. It contains mainly photographs and blog posts about library programs and exhibitions, new items in the collection and current events in the library world. It uses a tagging system and encourages users to leave comments.

Facebook

Used to share photos and videos of the library, inform people of upcoming events and services they might not be aware of, share posts about what other libraries are doing, promote the importance of libraries and thank people for attending events. Friends of the library are able to post comments requesting changes to services or discussing their experiences at the library. There is also a forum where people can ask questions of library staff. The moderators of the site are obviously Internet literate as there is good use of memes.

Pinterest

Hurstville LMG has 37 boards on Pinterest. Here are three of my favourites:

•  Astonishing libraries from around the world!

• Australian artists we admire

• Libraries of the rich and famous: Pictures of libraries owned by famous people, from rock stars and celebrity chefs to writers and directors. (I am so jealous of Jay Walker right now.)