AUT Library farewell photos, December 2015

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Social media and academic libraries: Is it overrated?

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It seems to me that every library feels like they need to jump on the social media bandwagon.  I wonder though how effective social media is at connecting libraries with patrons and of course marketing the library and all the other wonderful things it is supposed to do for an organization? My library has a twitter account but it has a mere 212 followers and a lot of them are not students.  The library Facebook page only has a few hundred "likes" and "visits."  We have an Instagram account and this currently has 386 followers.  Then there's our YouTube channel.  What are we really trying to achieve here?  Compare the popularity of our social media channels with that of our online subject guides.  For example our subject guide for APA referencing has had 196,720 views so far this year and the law guide 19,749 views.  I know that having a social media presence can be really useful at times.  One example is when there is an IT outage and stud...
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Recently my library integrated the reference help desk and lending desk into one service point where library assistants deal with both lending and simple research queries.  Here are the pros and cons of this change. Pros It allows library assistants to develop their research skills It frees up liaison librarians (LLs) so that they have more time in the day to do other more specialized tasks At times the desk is very quiet, especially in the evenings and early mornings and so it is a waste of staff resources manning a separate reference desk Cons LLs are unable to "keep their finger on the pulse" by being on the help desk and seeing what sort of inquiries are coming in from students and faculty Students may not get the same quality of service with their research inquiries that they would with an LL (although they can be referred to an LL if the query is complex) Answering reference queries adds to the workload of library assistants who may already have a full wor...
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