Book Review: Using Social Media in Libraries: Best Practices

Laura Solomon’s delightfully on-target Foreward sums up this book on libraries and social media: She quotes Avinash Kaushik (an analytics evangelist for Google), “Social media is like teen sex. Everyone wants to do it. No one really knows how.” (p. v). Solomon notes that social media is “more about building relationships than it is about promoting anything” (p. vii). This point is echoed in Walt Crawford’s Introduction, which focuses on the truth that libraries are at the heart of their local communities and that suggests that successful use of social media will strengthen those community bonds. Solomon and Crawford’s chapters set the stage for the remainder of the book, a series of best practices used by a variety of libraries.