Social Media Management with Sara Leavens

Sara Leavens from the Penn Libraries Advancement team and I met recently to have a 15-minute chat about what social media work means in 2017. We covered how Sara came to the libraries, what it looked like for her to compile all the Penn Libraries’ social media accounts under one umbrella, and what she thinks is the next big social media trend / need!

Some fun facts from our chat:

• Sara has one of the longest titles in the library: Communications, Marketing, and Social Media Coordinator at the Penn Libraries.
• Social media is 1/3 of Sara’s job.
• Anytime you read text from any of the Penn Libraries social media handles: @upennlib or The Penn Libraries, you’re reading Sara’s original copy or copy from colleagues that Sara has curated.

Here’s a screenshot of the Penn Libraries Twitter account that Sara coordinates:

• Social media at the Penn Libraries is curated across platforms.
• The Penn Libraries has an account with Lynda.com which is part of LinkedIn. The certifications there were hugely helpful for Sara. Having a basic LinkedIn profile is so important because it gives you access to so many digital tools and allows you to keep up with platforms and social media how-to’s beyond the classroom.
• The Penn Libraries offers photoshoots for LinkedIn profile photos.
• 1/3 of Sara’s job is marketing, so she spent a lot of time in our chat talking about all the resources the libraries can provide to student to learn about media in the online landscape.
• More and more students are looking outside of their traditional classroom settings to learn about digital and social media production.
• The Penn Libraries has been a warm and welcoming space for its interns to create new media. Sara’s background in creative writing and her MFA helped her curate an equally warm voice for the Penn Libraries text output.
• Creative writing experience + Sara’s generational experiences allow her to feel like the libraries is the best place for the merger between text and digital media.
• I mentioned that you need fundamental skills and keystone lessons in communication to become a good writer, but once you’ve taken those core classes, it’s fun to riff off of those basic skills and create new texts (digital, video, & audio texts).

Check out the full interview for more of our discussion:

Sara Leavens: Communications, Marketing, and Social Media Coordinator

This blog post is the kick-off for a series of profiles that I will be doing on Penn Libraries staff and how their work coincides with the use of social media to reach patrons both traditionally (as in, in-person) and digitally (as in, via blogs, social media, websites, etc.).

The Penn Libraries has been a personal, intellectual home for me over the last five years, and as I wrap up my time as a graduate student here, I hope to share with you some behind-the-scenes insight into the people and resources that have made it possible for someone like me–a non-traditional graduate student–to do the amazing work I’ve been able to do with social media and working directly with library patrons.

My hope is that by the end of this short series, you will come to appreciate all the Penn Libraries has to offer its patrons, and share in my wonder that we have access to these space and resources.

–Jaime Marie Estrada
Social Media Intern, Weigle Information Commons, Penn Libraries
Master of Liberal Arts Candidate, Philosophy and Communications, 2017

For the first blog post of the series “Social Media at Penn Libraries,” I’d like to introduce you to Sara Leavens, a recent addition to the Penn Libraries staff. Sara Leavens came to UPenn from the University of Kansas where she studied creative writing. Sara’s strengths lie in that she understands how to engage with students, faculty, and staff to make the resources available at the libraries more visible using social media and other forms of communications and marketing.

Recently, I had the opportunity to sit down with Sara and learn how she came to Penn and what her first few months on the job were like:

Sara Leavens started at the Penn Libraries as Communications, Marketing, and Social Media Coordinator in 2015.

Since Sara comes from a creative writing background, some of her role comes naturally to her! Sara has an MFA in Creative Writing and had originally planned on being a professor. However, she didn’t want to pursue a PhD, and with a technical communications background from her undergraduate work, she realized there was a need for social media at her academic department at the University of Kansas. Sara started the department’s Twitter and FB pages at the University of Kansas. Eventually, these pages became the most visited departmental pages at UKansas from 2013-2015.

When Sara first started at the Penn Libraries as Communications, Marketing, and Social Media Coordinator in 2015, she found the libraries’ many social media accounts to be quite established. She described her first few months here as a “good will tour,” where she met with head librarians and directors of the 14 (!!!) libraries, to learn about their current social media management and future needs.

From there, Sara went about the challenging and fun work of trying to ascertain and corral all of the social media accounts that each center and library had established for itself. In some cases, it took her as long as two years to hunt down and redirect some of the accounts! Centralizing communications and social media is a common trend being undertaken by many college and university campuses as they are starting to see social media less as a grassroots initiative and as more central to the branding and marketing of higher education to its most important audience: the students.

Social Media Outside of the Classroom

As the graduate intern for social media, I’ve been teaching social media workshops for Penn students, faculty, and staff at the Weigle Information Commons for over two years now. When I first started, it still was not clear what the purpose of social media was in the classroom or in academic life for that matter. However, more and more people are now buying into the idea of personal/professional branding and using social media platforms as learning tools.

In the last two years, we have all noted the rise of social media usage and how the lines between personal, professional, and useful are blurring. With the close of election 2016, the beginning of 2017, and the resurgence of using social media to organize in-person gatherings and protests, there is absolutely no doubt that social media will continue to rise in importance for college-age Americans and those who serve them as educators, mentors, colleagues, and support staff.

Here at the Penn Libraries, January has been an exciting time. On Saturday, the 14th, a hundred or so librarians, scientists, coders, hackers, and interested parties gathered to scrape data from NOAA.gov and other websites prior to the new administration potentially removing it from those sites. In addition, we have a series of workshops on identifying and avoiding “Fake News.” Individually, neither of these events is about “social media” in the way that my social media workshops are, but they are inherently linked to how undergraduate, graduate, and professional students use social media in their everyday lives on-and-off campus, in-and-out of the classroom.

Fake news is often perpetuated through news feeds on social sites like Facebook, Twitter, etc. In addition, accessing real news, and learning about real “threats” such as losing valuable information about climate change or other public scientific data, also occurs on social media sites. Most of us access our news digitally and many of us access our news on social media platforms.

For many years, I’ve heard concerns from older generations that millennials and younger generations consume news and “real information” differently and perhaps less intentionally. This quote from the Media Insight Project’s study on how millennials get their news is illuminating:

The worry is that Millennials’ awareness of the world, as a result, is narrow, their discovery of events is incidental and passive, and that news is just one of many random elements in a social feed.

This has been the concern of older generations of educators since I started working professionally with social media in college in 2010 and continues through to today. From my experience, students at both the graduate and undergraduate levels are very concerned that they are accessing and publishing the right information. There is a lot of social anxiety around what our brands look like online and building those brands requires a certain level of familiarity and comfort with using social media. For intellectual spaces like Penn, it also means that there is growing concern among active users of social media that their intellectual growth and learning empowers them to understand what they read and take action on it. Here are some of that 2014 study’s findings about how millennials consume news:

• While Millennials are highly equipped, it is not true they are constantly connected. More than 90 percent of adults age 18-34 surveyed own smartphones, and half own tablets. But only half (51 percent) say they are online most or all of the day.

• Email is the most common digital activity, but news is a significant part of the online lives of Millennials, as well. Fully 69 percent report getting news at least once a day — 40 percent several times a day.

• Millennials acquire news for many reasons, which include a fairly even mix of civic motivations (74 percent), problem-solving needs (63 percent), and social factors (67 percent) such as talking about it with friends.

As we look forward into this new year, I plan to attend as many workshops and teach as many workshops as possible about how to continue to be a responsible consumer of media. Keep the Penn Weigle Information Commons and the Penn Libraries’ programming sites bookmarked as these are themes that we continue to explore as a university and a community.

If you’re interested attending our ongoing workshops relating to media consumption, digital, and social media, here are a few:

(Jan. 30) Shoddy News

(Feb. 8) Creating Meaningful Graphics

(Feb. 15) Creating Video Presentations

Penn and the Surrounding Community

On the edges of the Van Pelt Collaborative Classroom, located just down the hall from the Weigle Information Commons,  an exhibit about the edges of Penn’s presence in West Philadelphia runs until Friday, February 24, 2017. Penn and the Surrounding Community is a collection of work by Dr. Rosemary Frasso‘s students from the SW781/PUBH604 class entitled Qualitative Research in Social Work and Public Health. This semester’s exhibit focuses on how undergraduate and graduate students here at Penn conceptualize the University’s impact on its urban setting.

Nominal Group Technique (NGT) (in which members of a group name, then rank items) was used to determine the topic of exploration for the class research study. Briefly, Dr. Frasso moderated a session where in the students suggested potential topic ideas, then ranked those ideas. The topic of Penn and the Surrounding Community was collectively chosen as the central theme for investigation.

First, the students collected free-listing data. Each of the 25 students in the class recruited 5 participants (total of 125 people) from the Penn community and asked them to share the words that come to mind when they think about Penn’s relationship with the surrounding community. These data (words generated) were then analyzed to determine the salient domains.

Then each student recruited one additional participant to take part in the Photo-elicitation arm of the study. Briefly, each participant was asked to think about Penn’s relationship with the surrounding community and using their camera or smartphone to take photos that would help them explain their impression of this relationship. The photos were then used to guide a qualitative interview. All interviews were recorded and transcribed verbatim and analyzed in the Collaborative Classroom.

The preliminary analysis yielded 10 thematic categories: Benefits, Safety, Permeability, Double-Edged Sword, Accessibility, Responsibility, Exclusivity, Bubble, Boundary, and Penntrification. Within these broad categorizations, representative photos and their accompanying captions were chosen for exhibition. The finished product will ultimately include an abstract for presentation as well as a manuscript for publication in addition to these preliminary findings currently on exhibit. The project can be viewed on the Scholarly Commons’ New Media Showcase.

The photos and quotes paint a complicated picture of how students perceive Penn’s relationship with the West Philadelphia community. The work highlights both the beneficial nature and drawbacks that are byproducts of Penn’s presence in West Philly, best described as a “double-edged sword.” For thought provoking insights like these, the exhibit is an enlightening and self-reflective project that is well worth the visit. Research rigor and critical social immersion blend to demonstrate the strengths of research in Public Health and Social Work.

 

Why Social Media?

Why social media at Penn? Social media at Penn and in college, graduate school, and in the professional world is not about scrubbing all traces of who you are off the internet. It’s about creating content that you are “sincerely” passionate about engaging with and making connections online that will lead to IRL experiences like your next research project, a career, a new friend, or an amazing conference experience.

I’ve now had this conversation countless times. As the Saturday consultant at the Weigle Information Commons, I’ve taught social media workshops at the Penn Libraries for two years now. Now and then, I publish a blog post on a particular social platform or tool. Every few months, a friend, a patron, a colleague, or a stranger asks about my work with social media and says, “Oh, I should really do more online!”

Congrats to Tanya Johnson!

Congratulations to WIC’s graduate intern and Excel tutor extraordinaire, Tanya Johnson, for winning the American Library Association’s 2016 LITA/Ex Libris Student Writing Award!  Tanya’s paper, “Let’s Get Virtual: An Examination of Best Practices to Provide Public Access to Digital Versions of Three-Dimensional Objects,” will be published in the peer-reviewed journal, Information Technology and Libraries.  In the meantime, Tanya is off celebrating in Florida, where she will receive the award at the ALA Annual Conference on Sunday.

Read the ALA’s newsletter announcing the award, and keep an eye out for her paper in an upcoming issue of Information Technology and Libraries!

 

Andrea Hornick’s Journeys – Digital Media Meets Fine Art with WIC iPads

Andrea Hornick – an artist, shaman, and Fine Arts Lecturer in Penn’s School of Design – recently used WIC’s iPads in the Classroom Program to create an immersive art gallery experience.

  

New Media Showcase on ScholarlyCommons: Highlights!

Last October, we introduced the ScholarlyCommons New Media Showcase, a repository of exceptional student work created using new media (like videos, comic books, images, posters, maps, and web projects). ScholarlyCommons is open access and allows us to share student work on a local, national, and global level. In fact, the front page of ScholarlyCommons has a map which shows downloads in real-time! You can see student work downloaded by users globally (be careful, it can be addicting to watch!).

 

When our Digital Literacy and Research Librarian, Vickie Karasic, asked if I would like to help with the creation of the New Media Showcase by talking to students and uploading their work, I was thrilled. My favorite part of working at WIC is supporting students through technology workshops, course interactions, contests, and one-on-one consultations. The New Media Showcase is an extension of this support–we now get to show off student work to the rest of the world! The showcase is robust and growing, but today I am going to highlight some of the excellent work from each showcase category: Comics, Images, Posters, Videos, and Web Projects.

Comics: Adventures with Austin by Katharine Cunningham

Our Comics section is popular, and Katharine Cunningham’s Adventures with Austin is a big hit. This comic won 2nd prize in Penn Libraries’ Comic Book Contest in 2009.

Images: There is a Whole Other World Inside by Jiali Sheng

Sheng created this image for the Got Visual? Poster Contest in 2010. Penn Libraries and the Weingarten Learning Resources Center sponsored this contest to promote visual literacy on campus. Sheng created this image based on four guiding questions:

1. What does learning mean to you?
2. How does learning happen?
3. What helps learning happen?
4. Where does learning take place?

Sheng hand drew this image using a tablet. If you are interested in trying something similar, come check out our Cintiq tablet in the Vitale Digital Media Lab.

Poster by Jiali Sheng.

Posters: Is Feminism Still Relevant? by Madeleine Stevens

Madeleine Stevens’ poster, Is Feminism Still Relevant?, has been downloaded globally a total of 165 times since February 2015! She created this poster for the Center for Undergraduate Research & Fellowships (CURF) Undergraduate Research Symposium.

Key visual elements:

• Cloud-like image formation
• Central box to highlight main problem
• Predominance of red, white, and blue colors

Videos: WE by Mengxi Cissy Tan

Mengxi Cissy Tan won 1st prize for her video, WE, in the 2014 Video Contest sponsored by WIC. In this video, Tan tells a story from her childhood in her native language.

Web Projects: Coastal Zones by Gavriela Reiter

Gavriela Reiter created a beautiful web project using Piktochart. Created for Alain Plante’s ENVS 400 course in Spring 2015, Reiter creatively uses images to illustrate statistics.

This is only a small sampling of the incredible student work we showcase on ScholarlyCommons, and we are adding new work as quickly as it comes in. Please take some time to peruse the site and see what your fellow students are up to! The showcase is another step in WIC’s 10-year history of supporting students.

Are you interested in seeing your own work published for the world to see? Fill out our permission form!

 

Festive Library Board Meeting

This guest post by Alex Burns C’17 describes a presentation for WIC’s 10th birthday at the February 2016 Penn Libraries Board of Overseers meeting. Alex is studying political science and you may meet him staffing the WIC Desk on weekday mornings.

The latest Penn Libraries board meeting was a little more festive than usual. Not because spring break was on the horizon, but because it was time to celebrate Weigle Information Commons’ 10th anniversary! At the meeting, a diverse group of students, professors, staff and alumni had the opportunity to reflect on their experiences at WIC.

It was really great to hear how Weigle has positively impacted people’s lives. Selamawit Bekele, a junior and Hoesley Digital Literacy Fellows, spoke about how the technology at WIC has helped her grow as a student. She went from having limited computer access before Penn to becoming an expert coder. It was also interesting to hear alumni echo my appreciation for the technology available at WIC. Ryan Leonard (C’10) shared a hilarious music video with the audience. He said it was made possible with the help of video production equipment from WIC. The highlight for me was watching Samantha Kannegiser’s slide show of her 10 favorite moments working at WIC. Her light-hearted presentation featured crazy Halloween costume pictures that drew a lot of laughs from the crowd. Overall, it was a fun event. I had the opportunity to talk about my experiences staffing the WIC Desk. Happy birthday WIC!

Here is a listing of the ten stories told at the meeting.

Penn Libraries Board Meeting – 10 WIC Stories

Wednesday, February 24, 11:30 am to 12:30 pm,

We share 10 stories to celebrate 10 years of the David B. Weigle Information Commons (WIC).

1. Dr. D. Kent Peterman, Associate Dean and Director of Academic Affairs, The College, School of Arts and Sciences, discussed the vision that led to the creation of the Commons and will share a bit of history about a “Collaboratory” process. Kent has guided the WIC Program Partnersfor the past decade, and helps WIC maintain a strong connection to curricular needs.
2. The Weigle Music Video created in October 2007 has brought smiles to audiences around the world.  Ryan Leonard C’10 was a freshman when he won our first Mashup Contest. He created this video with his prize camera and his two best friends. Today he manages data analysis with Tableau at Anthem, Inc in New York City. Ryan reflected on his adventures with video and WIC’s role in his career with healthcare consulting.
3. Taylor McLendon W’15 worked as a lab consultant in Vitale and presented on our 2012 symposium student panel. Taylor was selected for the first Daily Pennsylvanian Penn Ten. Today she works at Makuu, continuing to contribute to the Penn community.
4. Dr. Peter Decherney, Professor of English and Cinema Studies, helped create the WIC Faculty Advisory Group. He leads the Mashup Contest Selection Committee and the undergraduate student panel each year. Peter’s latest book Hollywood: A Very Short Introduction builds on his long-standing commitment to media law and policy, especially the regulation of Hollywood. Peter shared faculty perspectives on WIC’s work.
5. Sarah Jacoby created a powerful portrait of five Penn faculty during her time here as a lab consultant at the Vitale Digital Media Lab. Today, she is an an artist and illustrator with many exciting accomplishments to share. She has received many awards for her work including the Gold Medal from the Society of Illustrators.
6. Alex Burns C’17 is a junior in the College studying Political Science. He has staffed the WIC desk on weekday mornings for the past year, and has taken the lead on several WIC projects. He shared some reflections on how the space is helpful for students who have different backgrounds and expectations for support.
7. Samantha Kannegiser will graduate this May with a Masters in Library Science from Rutgers University. As a graduate intern at WIC, she led the creation of our New Media Showcase where we display, and permanently chronicle, the amazing works our students create for contests and classes. Samantha especially enjoys the lighter side of WIC’s work.
8. The Hoesley Digital Literacy Fellows Program reflects a board priority, and brings together a cohort of 15 students each year to “demystify technology, provide hands-on training and a website building project, and foster career connections.” Selamawit Bekele C’17 is a junior in the College majoring in Health and Societies, and shared experiences with the current cohort, managed by Vickie Karasic, Digital Projects Fellow.
9. The Seltzer Family Digital Media Awards supports innovative student projects using new technologies. Now in its ninth year, currently managed by David Toccafondi C’95, Manager of the Vitale Digital Media Lab, the awards get campus-wide attention. Carolina English C’16 is a senior in the College majoring in Visual Studies, and is a member of both the Seltzer and Hoesley programs this year. She shared her experiences with the programs as she approaches her graduation from Penn.
10. For many years, Ian Seltzer C’09 has supported the Seltzer Family Digital Media Awards by mentoring current students and serving on the awards selection committee.  Ian is a media consultant having worked at Hulu and Michael Eisner’s digital studio, Vuguru. He has developed, licensed and launched thirty original titles for TV, Film, the web in over 110 countries worldwide. He shared his reflections as an alum and a mentor.

Commons’ Publications: Reviewed

The Commons’ staff are no stranger to publishing and have written about technology, learning, collaboration, and teaching tools, all things we love at WIC. Recently, WIC Digital Projects Fellow Vickie Karasic and director Anu Vedantham wrote a chapter for Researching Language Learners Interactions Online: From Social Media to MOOCs (Dixon and Thomas). Their chapter, “Video Creation Tools for Language Learning: Lessons Learned” focuses on digital video creation tools and the benefit of using video assignments for language learning. Their chapter received a brief mention in a book review by Elena Martin-Monje this month:

 

“…video assignments enhance the understanding of other languages and cultures, while at the same time they enable students to be more aware of their own identity through this learning process.”

Vickie has written about this project before, including details of interviewing language faculty members at Penn. She has also showcased her workshop on using Audio and Video in PowerPoint for Beginning Japanese.

Read other reports and publications written about the Commons (the Educause article made 2014’s Top Ten Most Read list) and check out our monthly workshops if you are interested in learning some of the same tech tools referenced in the book!