HOW DO LIBRARIES OFFER SOCIAL MEDIA INFORMATION TO THEIR USERS?

The revolution of new media and its interruption in information and knowledge management forced libraries to move one step beyond that and accept other media apart from print: audio recordings, video tapes, DVDs etc. until we arrived to THE major revolution with the internet and online resources.

Nowadays a significant amount of information is stored not only in articles or books, but blogposts, or even tweets that can change the meaning of whatever that matters in the world at that moment. In the past, knowledge was stored in voluminous Encyclopaedias, books, newspapers, magazines etc. Now, you only need a quick tweet, or a blog post, or even better a video in YouTube.

How do we offer this information to our users? Can they retrieve it through our Social Media Discovery tool? Could your users find Barak Obama’s tweets in your catalog? Or Barak Obama’s website, or videos as a part of a search? Do you think this would be useful for them?

Well, we think that “Yes! It really would be”. We also believe that this is the natural evolution of library services. Our users as well as our community researchers are using social media more and more to communicate and spread information abroad, and libraries, as information providers need to be capable of offering this content to everyone who trusts them by using their catalogs.

  

Wouldn’t it be great if all the content that our community members produce via social media were part of your primo results page? Imagine that blogposts, tweets, YouTube videos and so much more could be part of your catalog as additional records, just as printed material or online resources are.

You can do all this now with Social Media Discovery 

We’ve developed this powerful tool with your users and your library in mind. We wanted to improve library services, to help libraries and librarians move forward at the same pace that information and technology moves. With Social Media Discovery you can easily integrate all the content that you think is of your institution’s interest to your discovery tool results page, so your users will retrieve it as another record, or entry of your resources.

It’s easy to integrate, easy to use, and a key feature that will differentiate your catalog from others.

Where can I get it?

1. Sign up for your annual subscription with Greendata: http://www.socialmedia-discovery.com
2. Download and install the SMD extension from the Google Chrome Web Store or the Add-ons Firefox page, whichever you prefer.
3. Configure

How does it work?

1.  Visit a website which you think is relevant for your institution's users, for instance Barak Obama’s twitter page.

2.   Click the Social Media Discovery icon next to the navigation bar. Check and change the fields according to your criteria and click Save Record.

3.  That's it! The record is saved in the Social Media Discovery service. You can publish, unpublish, edit and delete the saved records from the Records page. 

4. Now, you only have to wait till the indexing is finished to find it in your results page: