Social media and libraries in the scientific production of the United States

ABSTRACT

Introduction:

As organizations responsible for providing accurate and up-to-date information, libraries are continually experimenting with new technological resources and reshaping their services to meet the expectations of their users. At the beginning of the 21st century, social media emerged as another opportunity for them to connect to these spaces and access their information resources.

Objective:

Therefore, this study seeks to identify the characteristics of investigations on social media and libraries in the American scientific production, in order to follow its evolution and point out trends.

Methodology:

To this end, we opted for descriptive research, of a qualitative and quantitative nature, based on the domain analysis, proposed by Hjørland. The corpus consists of 69 articles, published in scientific journals of Information Science in the USA. In this sense, it was found that the theme of social media and libraries has been discussed in the context observed since 2006, mainly within the scope of university libraries.

Results:

It was also identified a possible epistemic community in formation. In turn, the Library 2.0 concept emerged as one of the theoretical contributions that influenced librarians and impacted services performed in the segment. In addition to Information Science, the knowledge produced on the analyzed interdomain circulates in various fields, such as Social Communication, Education, Computer Science, Sociology, among others. Apart from the term Web 2.0, social networks are the most used by this discursive community, although social media stands out as a trend. There is also a predisposition for research on practical applications, followed by theoretical studies.

Conclusion:

Emerging terms and representatives of the analyzed interdomain were identified, not yet covered in the main thesaurus used by researchers in the field.

KEYWORDS:
Social media; Social networks; Web 2.0 technologies; Libraries; Domain analysis