Twitter and Facebook Open the Door to Collaboration

Building a social media profile itself is a rewarding experience for digital librarians, but there is another aspect to social media immersion, and it is a powerful tool for the profession. As librarians establish expert status in the use of popular tools such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and WordPress, they can add training and even product development to their rosters of services. Three local examples of successful new media endeavors at the author's organization that prove this point are presented. And importantly, they also suggest that, although bold ideas are terrific, they may face a short life span if the new work is unsustainable. As simple and fun as social media is, it does represent another layer of work that goes on top of everything else. Digital librarians have an opportunity to make that workflow manageable--and when they do so, they became organizational change agents on the front lines.