Social media use is enabling special collections libraries to interact with their user and fan bases in ways that have not been possible in the past. By being connected to the internet, they can offer immediate information, updates, or answers to questions almost instantly that curious browsers can get in their living rooms. But which libraries have the biggest internet footprint? This project scraped Twitter data from accounts that are Special Collections Libraries in the United States and created a weighted visualization based on the top twenty-eight libraries that allows us to understand which libraries have the biggest impact on both the internet and other libraries. By analyzing the library Twitter data, statistics about who the power users were began to show themselves, and a visualization was made that shows how the most active libraries are connected, and who has the biggest digital footprint based on tweets, followers, follows, and other variables.

This study has provided a solid foundation for further investigation of the larger special collections libraries network in the United States. Visualizing a limited network of twenty-eight of the major special collections libraries in the United States and weighting the nodes in the network by total number of followers provides insights into the potential shape of a larger network. The assessment of centrality measures suggests that while numbers of followers is important to demonstrate high public awareness or popularity, the influence of individual libraries might best be demonstrated by a careful examination of centrality  and betweeness measures. Going forward, this study will be expanded to include as many as eighty-five special collections libraries and map all followers and friends of these libraries. Call limits and time constraints with the Twitter API made it necessary to restrict the scope of this study and instead pursue a project that would test whether a larger study was warranted and feasible. Such a study is in process. As part of that larger study, it will be useful to examine the relationships betweeni numbers of followers and tweets. The sheer volume of tweets posted by many of the most followed libraries suggests that additional investigation is warranted to determine the effectiveness of special collections libraries in their Twitter use.

For questions about this work, please contact me at: tswood@bsu.edu