Social Media List and Plan

Permit me to employ a time-honored aphorism: "Less is more."

This has been my philosophy regarding social media in all forms since I was an 8th grader, which made me the odd one out then and makes me still one today. For while I use Facebook to keep up with friends, and X (formerly Twitter) as medium mainly to advertise my book, I do not use and barely ever visit Instagram and Pinterest, and have never even visited TikTok. I do confess to using Reddit on occasion, but even that is rare. So, just so we understand each other, I am coming at making a social media list and plan regarding how I would most likely use social media to promote my library from a different place than most of my generation and may end up stretching the definition of what qualifies as social media; pushing the envelope, as it were. What can I say? I have always preferred reading books to social media.

Social Media List:

Reddit: Fortunately there are sub-reddits for just about anything literature relation. From Fantasy (my personal favorite) to one purely for suggesting and getting suggestions about books of any genre. When one needs to research a book before committing to or starting it, reddit will typically have all and sundry giving their often surprisingly well-thought-out takes on the book.

LibraryThing: A vibrant chat room to discuss any book or genre, a way to find (and get free!) newly published books, a means to organize your own digital bookshelf and review other books. I have the site for all these things.

X/Twitter's #writerslift: Go to Twitter and click the hashtag #writerslift and you will find a thousand and one posts asking authors to share their books, blogs, and whatnot in each of those post's individual threads. And authors respond with a vengeance, so if you are seeking something new that plus the hashtags #authorsoftwitter #writer and #writingcommunity will get you more recommendations than you know what to do with.

Stars Uncounted - Ian's Fantasy Bookshelf: Yes, you read that right. This is the definition of self-serving, but my other admittedly less yet still mostly humble blog would be, I think, a good and useful website for a librarians and young literati to use. It is genre-specific to Fantasy of course, but is popular enough that I get book review requests from budding authors at least one of whom has made a name for themselves. I told you I would push the envelope.

Facebook: If one cannot get good book recommendations from your friends, then there are countless Facebook groups about every literary/library related topics one can imagine. From author-fan pages to general groups for book lovers, it is a quintessential book-related social media experience.

Youtube: Book trailers both official and fan-made, book reviews, book summaries, fan theories about plots of as yet unfinished books series, even vocalists who perform songs written by authors. I found the Fantasy author Mercedes Lackey by coming across music written by her about her characters/books. Youtube has basically everything video and musical that relates to books.

Instagram: Many authors these days (not including me) are using Instagram as means to reach potential readers and with a considerable degree of success, therefore having students use this very social media site for literary purposes (such as interacting with authors, perhaps) would by an excellent and innovative move.

Social Media Plan:

Frankly I do not see using social media to promote a middle school library at all in the near future since social media has a habit of making things go out of control or down roads one would rather avoid. That said, I could see seeking permission to create a special blog (called Students Unleashed, perhaps) for students to post likely anonymous book reviews. It would be a useful tool for students seeking book recommendations and be a way for them to interact with the library more. Also, it would give teachers and parents alike a change to see what books their children and their children's classmates are reading, plus give the students a writing opportunity which I imagine many ELA teachers would capitalize on, thus furthering cooperation between the classroom teachers and the school librarian(s).

Adaptive and Assistive Technology

In Janet Hopkins' article School Library Accessibility: The Role of Assistive Technology (Hopkins, Janet. “School Library Accessibility: The Role of Assistive Technology.” Teacher Librarian, 31:3, February, 2004.) she offers ten ideas to aid Library Teachers in making their own school libraries more accessible to students with disabilities. To save blog space, I have included these in the adjacent image instead of copy-&-pasting them all.

What are my thoughts on them? To start, I think ideas 1, 2, and 6 are excellent and highly advisable. I think 3 is too general, as "barriers to learning" can be and mean anything to any number of people depending on the issues that impact. Some students simply have learning differences or are so far behind academically as to amount to accessibility problems, yet no assistive technology is required. For example, there are some students in the 6th Grade school I work at whose reading level is at 2nd grade. You would never know it speaking to them (or at least I did not), and assistive technology in the traditional sense of the term is little help because what they need are simply books at their level. Beyond that, I think idea 8 is good provided the need is great enough, yet the the rest of the ideas I deem as more aspirational than practical.

Which brings up a key point, for one notices that Hopkins' article is a decade old. Much has changed these last ten years, little more so – and so drastically – as technology. Now every student has a smartphone and many schools, including my own, provided chromebook laptops to the students. Not quite the same as in 2004 (when I was in elementary school). Hence I think the article shows it age a bit since these days students can get audio and basically any other type of book or reading aid swiftly, and in fact are often provided them by the school in advance, possibly before the Library Teacher is even aware of students individual needs, such as in the school I work at. In short, the 10 ideas sound pre-Digital Age, and also pre the days when a hyper focus is given to maximize accessibility. Still and again, as a general matter the ideas are worth considering and 1, 2, and 6 absolutely worth doing. By the way, everything I mentioned about what current schools do is also what my school does, and on the subject of idea 1, special educators have always come to the library first to alert us of special needs we should be aware of; though at the same time this rarely occurs since the special educators begin each year fully prepared and the role my supervisor have played in such matters has thus far been vanishingly small.

Multimedia - Book trailers

Studies indicate that people are more likely to read – or at least seriously consider and likely buy – a book when they have seen and enjoyed a book trailer of it. Which means, if a librarian is going to dabble in multimedia, that the ability to make engaging book trailers would be a useful skill to have in the ongoing to quest to make readers out of students. Hence here are two that I made, the first for my own book (though there is a reason why I later paid professionals to make a better one), and the second for Graceling by Kristin Cashore, one of my favorite Fantasies. By the way, I also made the music for the Graceling trailer myself.