Digital Activities

This year has been a busy year for the Library with regard to our digital output. We have continued to keep the website up to date with our latest opening hours and information on the services that we are running (now mostly returned to our pre-COVID arrangements). Although in-person exhibitions have now resumed, digital versions of each exhibition have still been curated and uploaded to the website in order to make them accessible to anyone unable to visit the Library. These include: ‘Women and their Books’; ‘“Weigh me the fire”: The Elements of an Old Library’ (Cambridge Festival 2022); and ‘Space and Time: An Early Modern Tour’. These are all available to view on the Library website.

The Library Online Exhibitions webpage banner, September 2022

Whilst the website is still important, our biggest digital focus this year has been on improving our digital communications. Following last year’s successful development of our Facebook outreach, we decided to conduct a ‘Social Media Survey’ during Lent Term 2022 in order to better understand the social media habits of our students and subsequently be able to better engage with them. The survey was intended to highlight which platforms students use to find information and also identify how they would like to receive communications from us.

Coordinated by our then Graduate Trainee, Jess Hollerton, an 11-question Google Form was circulated via an all-students email. By this method, the primary respondents were likely to be undergraduate students who might not already follow us on social media, which was the demographic we were most interested to target. Before the survey closed, it was also posted to our Twitter and Facebook pages.

The survey received 95 responses from a relatively representative proportion of each year (Figure 1). The data revealed that, of our current communications, all-student emails, College Bulletins and cross-posts to the JCR Facebook group were the most common ways of receiving Library news. However, the key finding from the survey was that, although Facebook was still widely used, Instagram was by far the most popular social media platform amongst those surveyed (Figure 2). This outcome was repeated in the figures for how patrons would prefer to receive Library communications, and, unsurprisingly, the most requested improvement to the Library’s social media offering was to create an Instagram account.

Figure 1: Respondent demographic

Figure 2: Most used social media platform

Consequently, at the end of May, we launched our new Instagram account (stjohnslibcam). This has been very well received by our students, with over 100 followers already, and regular engagements with our posts. We have found this a really useful way of getting information to our students quickly, and have also enjoyed being able to engage more informally with our student body by making use of interactive features such as stories and polls. We are really looking forward to expanding our outreach on this platform even more next year.

Katie Hannawin Library Assistant