Late to the Game but Ready to Play: portal Launches a Social Media Presence

I attended my first portal Editorial Board meeting in January 2009. As a newcomer in the first year of my first term, I was mostly there to listen and learn. During the segment that boards refer to as "new business," I ventured to share an idea. What if we, I suggested, used social media to share information about portal? My premise was to use social media to promote our articles, expand our readership, and potentially build a community of authors and readers. These seem like desirable outcomes for a journal.

Facebook was five years old and Twitter was two years new, and librarians had begun to establish an early presence on both. University and college libraries sought to build relationships with community members via a Facebook presence that promoted their services and events. Academic librarians used platforms such as Twitter to share information or establish a personal brand for professional recognition. In quick response to my proposal, a seasoned board member, and no doubt a holder of zero social media accounts, said, "Twitter, that's where people tell you what they are eating for lunch. Librarians pay it no attention." Given my new-to-the-board status, I left this misconception unchallenged. Conversation over. As many of us learn in higher education, today's rejected idea is tomorrow's new latest thing.

Turns out Instagram is where people share what they are eating. Twitter and Face-book, on the other hand, have proved to have genuine utility for academic librarians as communication channels for sharing not only news but also opinions, ideas, and accomplishments. Professionally, librarians regularly use these platforms to reach community members and one another. Amazingly, we have yet to give up on blogs.

Just eight years after my initial suggestion, portal is ready to move into the world of social media. Here is why: portal articles are widely read, well respected, and influential within academic librarianship. As social media matures, portal's lack of a presence hampers its mission to disseminate important research about academic libraries, librarian-ship, and the academy to our professional community. What may have seemed like a newfangled idea eight years ago is now a project that demands this Editorial Board's attention. When the board last met in June at the American Library Association Annual Conference, there was resounding support for forging ahead with portal's entry into social media. This new effort will align with the existing Johns Hopkins University Press social media presence but will differ by focusing on this journal's content, its authors, and readers.

Leveraging social media enables portal to increase its reach and connect with an even wider audience. Within the Johns Hopkins University Press collection, we can draw on the experience of such journals as Shakespeare Bulletin or the Hopkins Review. Both offer excellent examples of how to establish a presence and brand on both Facebook and Twitter. Sharing links to article preprints is one way to accomplish this, and we believe our authors will gain more readership as a result. But we aspire to use social media to also build a community of portal readers. We want to make portal a more participatory experience for them by bringing our content directly into their practice. In so doing, we can improve our readers' ability to share feedback and ideas generated from our articles.

Social media should be more than a one-way communication by which portal directs information to the academic library community. Just as librarians wish to do within their own library and institutional communities, portal might leverage social media as a platform for engagement with our readership. In what ways can social media be used to enhance the experience of connecting with portal content? One way in which portal will use social media is to open a communication channel from our readers. We want to hear from you. What do you think of the articles we carry? Are our columns providing meaning and relevance to your work? Are there topics or issues we tend to overlook? When readers have something to say...