Beyond Leaflets: Sharing Messages, Digitally

Beyond Leaflets

Layers of flyers on a Berkeley bulletin board
One of the hallmarks of being on a university campus is the proliferation of flyers and leaflets. I remember sitting in Sproul Plaza as an undergrad at Berkeley and marveling at the thickness of the layers and layers of flyers posted on those big blue boards. That’s part of the reason why I love this picture of flyer scraps.

But the Graduate Center is different. While there are a few pockets of space on each floor designated for flyers, there is no central physical space that could be considered an information exchange, in the truest sense of the word.

There is no quad at the GC. Perhaps that’s why digital spaces like OpenCUNY and the CUNY Academic Commons are so important at the Graduate Center. Outside of the dining commons, there are few physical spaces where students and faculty can gather outside of our own departments.

There is, however, a library. The GC Library has long served as a research hub, connecting faculty, students, and staff with print/digital/microform/audiovisual materials throughout the city, and beyond. But the library is also a shared space — for thinking, for creating, for working. It’s not hard to imagine libraries as the original coworking spaces. How do we expand our presence to reach those graduate students who never work on campus, those who spend untold hours commuting from apartments in Brooklyn to teach at, say, CSI?

Social Media and Digital Outreach

 

Just over a year ago Reference Librarian Shawn(ta) Smith started this blog, as a way to connect our patrons–our community–with the goings-on at the library. But, as social media gurus like to say, the best way to reach people is to meet them where they’re at. So, over the past few months, we’ve freshened up our look and broadened our reach…

…on Facebook

Facebook Profile Screenshot

…and Twitter.

Twitter_Profile-screenshot

Heck, we’ve even updated our pages on Yelp and FourSquare (want to be the Mayor of the library?).

We’re not alone. The Graduate Center recently unveiled a new guide, Social Media @ the Graduate Center with a complete list of GC departments and programs on Facebook and Twitter.

As scholarship itself moves to online spaces, your librarians are there too. At CUNY, librarians are tenure-track faculty who conduct research and perform professional service activities within (and, often, outside of) the library profession. We present at conferences, publish and edit books and peer-reviewed articles, and take on topics like the future of scholarly communication, digital preservation, critical pedagogy and information literacy, and social justice. We do things like this and this and this and this.

So when you see the GC Library logo on Twitter, or catch a post from us as you scroll through Facebook, know that it’s not just faceless “marketing” — it’s your librarians, your peers, sharing our scholarship, our news, and our thoughts. You just might see an occasional cat, too. After all, we’re only human.

Image credit: Genealogy of a Leaflet, by Ingrid Taylar on Flickr

About the Author

Roxanne Shirazi is assistant professor and dissertation research librarian at the CUNY Graduate Center, where she also serves as project director for the CUNY Digital History Archive and oversees the college’s institutional archives.