Social media have revolutionized today's globalized world including all spheres of modern human being. Among many social networking sites (SNSs), Twitter is one of the most popular. Librarians all over the globe are increasingly using Twitter in their daily routine activities as well as promotion of their systems and services. This study is an attempt to map the Indian libraries' Twitter activity, taking academic libraries as case study. Selected Indian academic library tweets have collected form the Twitter using R programming language. The study further compares few develop countries' academic library tweets. The study observed that Indian academic libraries are very limited activities in Twitter. The sentiment analysis shows that library Tweets are more positive. The study recommends more Twitter activity for Indian academic libraries to attract their users. With the more Twitter activities, library's image will be more friendly and acceptable to the young users particularly the college and university students.
TopIntroduction
In the present day, with the development of latest Information and Communication Technology (ICT), particularly with the advancement of many Web Technologies, the human life has been transformed in an unprecedent way. Today, social media and its effects are all pervasive. There are many Social Networking Sites (SNSs) which have become inseparable for modern human being. Libraries are not immune to this recent ICT effect, rather libraries all over the globe are the primary adopter of ICT systems and services. The use of social media tools like microblogs (e.g. Twitter) has gained wide acceptance in libraries and among librarians globally (Munigal 2014). Library and Information Science (LIS) professionals are always forerunners in adoption and utilization of the latest ICT tools and techniques for disseminating information to their users. Libraries have adopted various ICT tools in their routine housekeeping activities, marketing their systems and services. In the recent years, many of the routine library activities are getting new dimensions with the popular social media. For example, the networking sites, like Facebook and Twitter are getting popularity in libraries and librarians for promoting their library services. Among all the SNS, Twitter is the most popular microblog where anyone can open an account and post textual, video, images and other contents. However, its users can post very limited text. It is freely available and become common in all strata of public life.
Librarians have struggled hard to dispel their stereotype image in information processing and management. The people's perception of libraries and librarians is gradually changing with the ICT tools to deliver services innovatively. Twitter is one of those innovative ways that librarians have added to existing communication channels (Patra 2019). Many big and famous libraries around the world use Twitter for their various services for example, content alerts, Selective Dissemination of Information (SDI), Current Awareness Service (CAS) and so on services (Munigal 2014).
Because of its handy and inexpensive characters, librarians worldwide are using it as an effective communication tool. The greatest advantage of Twitter is its direct and two-way communication with its users. In Twitter librarians can interact with their users and can get direct feedback.
In this context, it is an exploratory study of Indian academic libraries’ activities in Twitter. Indian Libraries are one of the early adapters of ICT tools in their libraries among the developing Asian countries. However, how the Indian libraries are in social media network is the main objectives of this study. To fulfil this objective this study has selected academic libraries as case study. Some selected libraries are chosen and their Tweets are collected from the Twitter handle. The study will further examine the most frequently occurring keywords and the sentiments are derived from the tweets.