High school librarian's views on social media : A tool to reach the users

The majority of Sweden's population has access to the Internet and are frequent users of social media. Social media do not only meet people's needs to network, but can also play a role when it comes to their information needs. The library users are on social media, so therefore it is natural for libraries to also be there. Because young people of today grow up in a digital media world, we thought it would be interesting to examine how school libraries make use of these media. The purpose of this paper is to examine high school librarians’ use of social media. We connected four research questions; why does the librarian use social media, how can the librarian use social media in their professional, how can the use of social media contribute to the librarian's skills and how does librarians communicate via social media. We used qualitative interviews as our method to answer our questions. The theoretical framework was based on Jochumsen, Hvenegaard & Skot-Hansen's "The four space" model, which regards the library as a meeting space, inspiration space, learning space and performative space. It is in the original directed at the public library, but in our application it has been adapted for the school library operations and focused on the digital part of the school library. We found that librarians use social media mainly to promote their libraries. They also use social media to keep up on current research and to keep in touch with other librarians. They all find it desirable to have more contact with their users and a greater use of two-way communication