Twitter and the Lack of a Participatory Culture in American College Libraries

Abstract

This study is a social media analysis on the use of Twitter at Historically Black Colleges and University libraries in the United States. Researchers have begun examining how libraries use social media however; the vast majority of these studies are situated at large flagship research-intensive universities. We leverage the IBM Watson analytic engine, to systemically examine over 23,000 tweets around propagation and sentiment, to assess follower engagement. The analysis found little evidence of follower engagement with library generated content. However, we observed a substantial volume of library tweets coalesced around institutional boosterism, rather thanlibrary related phenomena.