Library Staff Social Media Policy

A library, especially a public one, is usually a non-profit organization, and thus has no profit motive for maintaining customer satisfaction. That said, a faulty or nonexistent online presence can spell doom for a library in the sense of losing potential funding, failing to draw in new patrons, and failing to hold the interest of current library users.

In most for-profit organizations, it must be decided who will handle customer complaints and in which department, leading to a necessity for communications between departments (Smith, Wollan & Zhou, 2011). In a library, by contrast, there may be several people monitoring, for example, an email account dedicated to answering reference questions. At King Library, a hybrid public and academic library in San Jose, CA, this could be anyone from an academic or public librarian to a student intern. If all such persons are present, one could hand individual questions off to another based on their respective areas of expertise. Thus, the concern is less who should handle the questions than what the standardized form of response should be. Many libraries have standard "answer templates" or other guidelines in place; such boilerplate issues should be decided in advance to the fullest extent possible.

Many librarians enjoy expressing their opinions, anonymously or not, on the state of all things LIS on personal blogs. Although most social media policies would not - and should not - prevent this, I would stipulate in the policy that employees identify the site as expressing their opinions only and not those of their employer, if the employer can be reasonably identified from information on the site (Heathfield, 2011).

In terms of releasing confidential information on such applications, my main concern would be for patron privacy. Anything that could be potentially damaging to a patron in turn damages the organization's ability to maintain a reasonable expectation of confidentiality. Distributing library materials online would also be prohibited, not because of any loss of profit but because of potential violations of fair use.

Many libraries, especially smaller ones, do not necessarily have a dedicated department, or even individual, to answer media inquiries and deal with public relations. Here, again, it would be useful to develop a template or at least a set of guidelines for any individual with access to the "common" media inquiries account. A clear and concise set of predetermined answers, while not always applicable, could play a crucial role in the library's public image and reputation.

References

Heathfield, S.M. (2011). Blogging and social media policy sample. Retrieved from http://humanresources.about.com/od/policysamplesb/a/blogging_policy.htm

Smith, N., Wollan, R. & Zhou, C. (2011). The social media management handbook: everything you need to know to get social media working in your business. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.