Technology: WordPress
Context: As a tool for promotion of library resources and communication between librarians and patrons
Audience: Adult and teen patrons of libraries
Audience: Adult and teen patrons of libraries
During the past week, I interviewed two student employees who are working or were responsible for the update of jobs blog by utilizing WordPress for the School of Library and Information Science of UW-Madison. My interviews mainly focused on two parts: the feelings about using WordPress, and the comparison between WordPress and newer social networks such as Twitter and Facebook in the promotion of Library information. In the interviews, both of them provided me with plenty of valid and practical experience and direct feelings based on their own work stories.
About WordPress, both of my interviewees regard it as a good
library tool, especially as a “virtual bulletin board” because it’s a simple
platform with simple ways to input metadata. Moreover, with a great tagging
function, it's searchable for users and easy to navigate. Another interesting and
convenient function they introduced to me was that WordPress enables its users
to create settings to get postings in their email, which could save a lot of
time that were supposed to spent in filtering tons of other junk information
when using Facebook or Twitter.
However, they also mentioned that WordPress is more of a
blog format rather than a social media format. It provides long blog posts with
detail information, which at most time, would make people choose platforms with
simpler and clearer massages instead. Hence, it would get less viewers than
social networks and probably would be not “hip enough” to attract young adults
and teenager patrons. WordPress would be regarded as an academic information
platform rather than a popular social network. Since it’s too detail and doesn't
have any sense of followers or people liking it, it might be not necessary to
promote library resources via WordPress.
One of the interviews was in person and took place on April
4th, 2014 and the other was conducted via email on April 5th,
2014.
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