I’m hoping that the book, and any future research, will be useful. It might help a librarian (or a volunteer at a very small library) say “Hmm. There are a bunch of other libraries our size who seem to be able to attract followers. What are they doing differently?” And I hope the commentary will help answer that question. But the “what we’re doing good/what X did good” articles and posts are, in my opinion, absolutely vital as well.

Where I think some (certainly not all, maybe not most) of the traditional literature may fail is the extent to which it focuses on “look at what this very well funded library with lots of extra staff members did”–which can be a little discouraging if you’re in a more typical library, as can admonishments that you need to post every single day for your social network presence to be useful or that if you don’t have lots of conversations happening, you’re failing.

I think maybe the reason that most of the writing that gets done about libraries and social networks is about “look at this cool thing this one library did” is that that sort of article is the kind of thing you can copy. “Oh, hey, we could tweet and ask people about their favorite books!” strikes me as more helpful in terms of getting an idea what to do with your Twitter account than knowing “oh, libraries with our service population tweet an average of 4 times a week.”

I guess I’d draw the analogy of wondering whether typical libraries comparable in size to yours managed to fill most or all of their parking lots on a regular basis. Is that information useful? Not sure.

If you’re in a tiny library (one with an LSA of <1,000) or what I’m lumping together as small libraries (up to 9,999), is it useful to see how frequently other libraries of those sizes manage to post–and how successful they are at getting community engagement?

Again, I’m not sure. Maybe taking this beyond the book is pointless; hell, maybe adding the additional states is pointless. It’s clearly not something I’ll pursue on my own.

Then again, if you asked me about the usefulness of a whole series of survey-based “research” reports in the library field, I’d be hard-pressed to provide an answer or to keep from laughing. So I’m certainly not offended by the question!

Why do you think such a study would be useful? Why is it important how frequently a library tweets? What would someone want to do with these spreadsheets of data?

I’m not trying to be difficult — I’m truly wondering — because my initial impression is that this data would be about as useful to me as, say, knowing the average percentage of cars parked in library parking lots that are red (although now that I mention that, of course, I’d be fascinated to know, and to know if there’s any difference in car color make up between, say, libraries and malls). But yeah. Anyway. I’m mystified.