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A lost score and a great charter: social media collaborations
- 1. A lost score and a great charter Social media collaborations Jonathan Bush Archive and Early Printed Books Cataloguer @UshawLibrary Rachel Smith Communications and Marketing Officer @PalaceGreenLib
- 2. • Background • Collaborations with researchers • Collaborations with press • Collaborations with academic departments • Collaborations with visitors • Collaborations with partners • Collaborations with businesses • Lessons learnt Introduction
- 8. Deryck Webb
- 9. Giovanni Battista Pergolesi (1710-1736)
- 14. Dr Peter Leech
- 24. Our approach • Targeting younger audiences (Key Stages 3-5, Students, 18 – 50 age range) • Social media used to reach these audiences • Measuring visitor interaction via social media • #MagnaCartaDurham • Magna Carta Durham Facebook Page Our approach
- 32. Collaborations with core partners
- 33. Collaborations with event partners
- 34. Collaborations with event partners
- 38. Conclusion • Range of collaborators • Reasons for collaboration • Results of collaboration
- 39. A lost score and a great charter Social media collaborations Jonathan Bush jonathan.bush@durham.ac.uk @UshawLibrary Rachel Smith r.l.smith@durham.ac.uk @PalaceGreenLib
Editor's Notes
- Jonathan: Hello, I’m Jonathan, I work as an archive and early printed books cataloguer and run the Twitter account at Ushaw College Library (currently being managed by Durham University Archives and Special Collections). Rachel: And I’m Rachel, and my role is Communications and Marketing Officer for the Library and Heritage Collections. I’ve recently been leading on regional marketing and social media for Palace Green Library’s Magna Carta exhibition. Our presentation today is entitled ‘A lost score and a great charter: Social media collaborations’. And if any of you feel like collaborating with us on social media today, feel free to post about our presentation on Facebook or Twitter @UshawLibrary and @PalaceGreenLib!
- In this session Jonathan and I are going to present the work we’ve been doing for Ushaw College and Magna Carta respectively as two case studies. In each of the case studies, we’ll explain a bit of the background and context to our social media collaborations, and then we’ll move on to the collaborations themselves. In the first case study Jonathan’s going to look at how Ushaw College have been collaborating with researchers on Twitter to solve the mystery of the ‘lost score’ of the title. He’ll move on to how this developed into a collaboration with the press. He’ll also talk a bit about how he and some of his volunteers have been collaborating with our academic departments at Durham University on social media. In the second case study, I’ll be talking to you about my experience of collaborative social media work this summer for our Magna Carta exhibition. I’ll be looking at the ways in which we’ve been collaborating with our visitors on social media, as well as key partners and events providers. I’ll also touch on some of our collaborations with local businesses and the press. And we’ll share some of the lessons we’ve learnt along the way. So, I’ll hand over to Jonathan…
- Our second case study will look at how social media has been used throughout Palace Green Library’s summer 2015 exhibition, Magna Carta and the Changing Face of Revolt. As I mentioned, I’ve been leading on the marketing for the exhibition. Intro to exhibition: 2015 marks the 800th anniversary of the sealing of Magna Carta by King John Commemorations in the UK and around the world Palace Green Library, Durham University’s historic library on the Durham World Heritage Site, ran an exhibition from 1 June to 31 August featuring the only surviving 1216 version of the charter, on loan from Durham Cathedral, and used this as a starting point for exploring the history of revolt
- Our Marketing and Communications strategy for Magna Carta has some relevant points when it comes to social media. As well as attracting Palace Green Library’s existing audience, which is typically the over 50s demographic, I was tasked with attracting a new target audience – the under 50s. Specific groups mentioned in the marketing strategy were Key Stages 3-5, Students (particularly DU) and the general public from the 18 – 50 age range. The latest data on social media shows that use of social media is highest amongst these groups: Over 70% of all adults aged 18 – 49 use Facebook Over 25% of all adults aged 18 – 49 use Twitter So, social media necessarily became one of the ways we were going to connect with this new audience. The marketing strategy also outlines how we’re going to measure the success of marketing activity, and one of the four indicators was evaluating visitor interaction. Quoting from the strategy, this was specifically ‘engagement with, and amount of user-generated content on, social media channels’. So, we started using a hashtag around the exhibition #MagnaCartaDurham, and we set up a Magna Carta Durham Facebook page, as Palace Green Library didn’t have their own page at that point.
- One of the most interesting ways we’ve collaborated with our visitors to Magna Carta on social media has been via a Twitter terminal in the last gallery of the exhibition. To put it in context, this gallery, as well as bringing the story of revolt up to date through an AV presentation which highlights recent rebellions, is all about engaging our visitors in the debate about what they think of the exhibition and which of their rights as a citizen they would protest for. So we’ve used a touch screen terminal to give visitors the opportunity to send a tweet from the Palace Green Library Twitter account. They type their name, and their message, and they can even include a photo using a small camera on top of the screen. Then, they send it through to approval, we check it over and
- Then, they send it through to approval. We check it over, add ‘says’, and the #MagnaCartaDurham hashtag. and it gets sent through to our @PalaceGreenLib Twitter account. Here’s an example of some of the feedback we’ve been getting through: Jane and Lucy – generalised feedback, the sort of thing we’ve also been getting through our more traditional visitor book. Lucy has included a photo:
- Then, they send it through to approval. We check it over, add ‘says’, and the #MagnaCartaDurham hashtag. and it gets sent through to our @PalaceGreenLib Twitter account. Here’s an example of some of the feedback we’ve been getting through: Jane and Lucy – generalised feedback. Lucy and her mum have included a photo – I’m 2 and this was great! Tweetymail is the platform we’ve been using for this to make it as automated as we can…
- Others, like Isaac J and Ken have responded to the themes of the exhibition and the questions around the screen: ‘Say no to nationalism’ These comments will be analysed as part of the evaluation of the exhibition, as we’re hoping the exhibition will be part of the University’s next REF submission for the History department. Although we’re still looking at the comments / levels of engagement at the moment, we as a team consider this to have been a really successful initiative and we are planning on using the same technique for our next exhibition on Antarctica.
- Another social media collaboration we’ve been trying out with visitors is a Spotify playlist – this is the first time we’ve done this for any of our exhibitions. We picked 10 songs on the theme of rebellion and revolt and added them to an initial playlist – you can see them on the screen here.
- We also created a webpage to accompany the playlist which explained a bit more about the project. Every Friday during the first six weeks of the exhibition run, we used the hashtag #RebelMC on social media to ask our followers to tell us their favourite songs of rebellion. We chose a few each week to add to our playlist, and we added their reasons to the website too.
- Here’s an example from Facebook from June. The good thing about a Spotify playlist is that there are lots of assets already available – videos from YouTube of the songs, album covers etc, so that made some interesting content for post. Gemma M Anderson here has suggested Muse’s Uprising, which we added to the list. We ended up having 26 songs in total – 10 suggested by us, 16 suggested by others. However, quite a few people suggesting songs had a connection with Palace Green Library, so I would say that this had limited success. I think maybe if it had a stronger tie to the actual exhibition, like the Twitter terminal which had a physical presence in the gallery, that might be more successful.
- As mentioned, we worked in association with Durham County Council and Durham Cathedral. With both of these partners, we provided them with regular updates so that they felt able to post about the exhibition and our event programme in an informed way. By providing social media content to partners, you’re making collaboration as straightforward as possible. Something we also did on the This is Durham site was that I wrote a guest blog post on the This is Durham blog. We don’t have our own blog, so that’s definitely one way of extending our reach on social media, and this gave This is Durham some unique content to post about. This was the first time I’d written a guest post in a library context (although I have guest blogged before for a magazine) so this was an interesting challenge for me – providing content that was less formal and more personal than the standard web copy we’d been producing.
- We also worked with a range of other partners on the associated event programme, and we were very keen to collaborate with them on social media too. A good example of this is the way we collaborated on the academic lecture series, which ran for the first six weeks of the exhibition. Durham University’s Institute of Medieval and Early Modern Studies organised a series of lectures around the themes of Magna Carta and citizenship today. We collaborated with them and the speakers by covering this on social media. The first way we did this was by filming the series of videos for YouTube – here’s a screenshot from the video of Professor Guy Standing talking about his work on the Precariat Charter. To do this, we asked each of the lecturers for their permission to film the lectures, and we also got copies of their slides where relevant to incorporate into the videos. This not only gave us some great content for YouTube and helped us to communicate the themes of the exhibition to a much wider audience than would be able to attend the lecture, great for both us and the speaker themselves.
- Another thing we did with the lecture series was live tweet during the lectures – so this is from one of the other lectures in the series by Professor Maarten Prak from the University of Utrecht. This was another way of extending the lecture beyond the walls of the Learning Centre at Palace Green Library. Both the filming and live tweeting of the lectures was a new development for Palace Green Library, and it’s something we’re planning to use again for our forthcoming exhibitions on Antarctica.
- I also wanted to touch on social media collaborations with local businesses. We worked really closely throughout Magna Carta on getting in touch with local businesses, working with them on linked projects and providing them with materials so they could promote the exhibition – working to facilitate this. Here’s an example of some of the results of this work on social media – major hotel chain Radisson Blu wrote a blog post about Durham’s Magna Carta on their blog, which covers all of their UK hotels. They got in touch to ask for some images that they could use, which we provided – such as this photograph of Palace Green Library.
- The last area I wanted to touch upon was how we collaborated with press on social media. When I was planning the PR for the exhibition, I was keen to make sure that as well as inviting press to come in for photographs and interviews, we arranged our own coverage so we had something to provide to both press who were unable to attend, and a permanent record of key events for our own social media platforms. For both our ticket launch and the opening of the exhibition, we commissioned North News to come in and create a short news video for us. These were the only videos we did that weren’t done in house, because for press, you need it to be of the right quality / tone for broadcast use and I felt that this wasn’t something we were going to be able to achieve on existing resources. Once North News had created the videos, they sent them out to local press contacts, and we used them across our web channels. Here’s the exhibition opening video being used on our Twitter account, which is linking through to the video on our YouTube playlist.
- …and here’s an article from the Chronicle – they’ve used our video, and combined this with their shots of the exhibition from the press preview event. Basically, I would say that for press, all stories need to have images and if possible video, so by commissioning something of news quality standard, we’re making the stories about the exhibition as feature-worthy as possible.
- Wide range of collaborators: from the academic community, to general public, to other organisations Different reasons for collaboration: (Jonathan) broadening our understanding of the items in collections, strengthening links with academic departments (Rachel) promotion of exhibitions and events, public engagement with research themes Results of collaboration: broadening access to collections and research through digital media, increased engagement with special collections, new audiences, future collaborations?
- You can contact either of us after the presentation if you want any more information. Any questions?