The keyword you are looking for in today’s post, friends, is
Discoverability!
Making sure information can be found when it is sought is a huge part of what we as information professionals do. We take great care — and lots of staff hours, training, ongoing professional development, and labor costs — to make sure the resources we make available to our patrons are in a real sense available to them via our online catalogs and through the structured and coordinated layout of our facilities (if we work in libraries, because certainly not all of us do) and electronic platforms and spaces, such as our “virtual branch,” the library website.
Tagging is one way to see to the same core principle and priority of our profession in a social media context or online medium. Hashtags can make it easier for us to find the answers we need from fellow professionals, can give us ideas for Teen Tech Week bulletin boards, and can be a tool for grandparents to find and share what their grandchildren are doing at their #librarysummerreadingprogram with relatives and friends.
Hashtags may be used in a similar manner. Although I will personally admit to the guilty pleasure of enjoying hashtags used as social critique or in jest, the primary purpose of a well-used hashtag is to organize information and do that job quickly, concisely and well.
As for how we might use tagging in our professional lives, besides the ways mentioned above, as I read the assigned readings for our module this week, the one mention of hashtags that practically leapt off the page for me was that Kickstarter allows tags to help potential supporters find you and invest in your idea. This one use of hashtags alone could be huge for a library!
We might also get really creative with hashtags and tagging blog posts and turn them into part of a virtual program, as I did in the summer of 2015 when I created a Scavenger Hunt as part of Teen Summer Reading which ranged all over the college town my library served. When participants found a clue, they were to take a photo of their team in front of the object/building/landmark or with the person in question or wearing the thing requested, post it to one of two social media platforms, tagging the library and using a specific hashtag so that I would make sure not to miss any entries when tallying the scores. Those who did not use social media could also email the librarian those photos or bring in an analog version which required they answer questions about the clue in case no one on that team owned either a smartphone or digital camera, because we live in a place where the digital divide is still noticeable and we did not want to create barriers to participation.
It was so much fun and so easy to keep up with via hashtags that I designed another library contest for Banned Books Week that year asking teens to come up with a creative photo of themselves reading a banned book. I provided a list of banned and challenged books, an informational brochure, and let teen patrons use the three library iPads to take pictures of themselves anywhere in the library so everyone could participate. On my second foray into creating a social media hashtag, I shortened it up considerably and made it easier to remember.
As an added and unforseen bonus, cool, artistic, designer photos of our local teens READING kept popping up in the library’s Facebook feed, and teens were regularly linking to us on Instagram and Twitter, which brought many more teens over to look. It’s hard not to click when you see #bannedbooks anyway, right?
Tagging is essential for our work and meets one of the core principles of our profession, true. But it can also be a ton of fun.
Ancora Imparo 