Library support for emergency management during the time of natural disasters: Through the lens of public library Twitter data

The public libraries in the Carolinas engaged with their communities using Twitter throughout the phases of Hurricane Florence in 2018. A total of 161 libraries in Carolinas were examined. The framework of crisis informatics, content analysis, and network analysis were applied to 738 Twitter posts from 17 libraries, which had Twitter presence, to understand interaction details between the libraries and communities that they serve. Findings include that the libraries shared a mixture of both disaster- and non-disaster-related information via their Twitter pages. The disaster-related tweets were mostly shared in the During (291 out of 349) and After (56 out of 349) phases. The number of general library-related tweets in the During phase dropped drastically compared to those in the Before or After phases. The libraries were also retweeting disaster-related tweets from various governmental agencies and NGOs to the community members in their social network. These findings indicate that the libraries switched their roles from a general services institution to an emergency information hub as the threat from the hurricane began affecting the communities. The knowledge gained from our study could be used to improve community resilience by further illuminating the role of public libraries as public infrastructures that host and facilitate the development of social capital during and after disaster events by becoming information and communication hubs.     

高校图书馆微信公众平台推文内容建设探究——以北京师范大学图书馆为例

[目的/意义] 旨在为高校图书馆进行微信公众平台推文内容建设提供经验和建议。[方法/过程] 通过案例分析、网络数据调研和对比分析的方法,介绍北京师范大学图书馆微信公众号在推文内容建设方面的理念、原则、效果和管理方式等。[结果/结论] 提出注重微信内容板块整体规划,坚持文案原创,精品原创栏目化,加强校内新媒体合作以及大力推动微信工作制度建设等方面的建议。     

#SocialJournalism: Local News Media on Twitter

A content analysis of 4,507 tweets from 60 local news organizations in the United States was conducted to examine Twitter strategies used by the local news industry. Results indicate that local news organizations in the United States mainly used Twitter as an additional platform for news dissemination. While local TV stations and newspapers differed significantly in their use of tweet structures, content, and strategies, both followed the similar practices of their traditional media portals. In addition, the number of followers and total tweets of a news organization’s Twitter account, use of photos, hashtags, usernames, and tweet content predicted audience engagement with the site. Overall, local news organizations in the United States did not appear to use Twitter to cross-promote and/or supplement their traditional business practices. This research calls for more systematic, multi-dimensional social media management in local newsrooms.     

Which papers cited which tweets? An exploratory analysis based on Scopus data

Many altmetric studies have analyzed which papers were mentioned how often on Twitter (one of the most important altmetrics sources). In order to study the potential relevance of tweets from another perspective, we investigate which tweets were cited in papers. If many tweets were cited in publications, this might demonstrate that tweets have substantial and useful content. Overall, a rather low number of citations to tweets (n=13,149) by less than 7,000 papers was found. Most tweets do not seem to be cited because of any cognitive influence they might have had on studies; they rather were study objects. Thus, this study does not support a high relevance of tweets (for research). Most of the papers that cited tweets are from the subject areas Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities, and Medicine. Most of the papers cited only one tweet. Up to 65 tweets cited in a single paper were found. An author keyword analysis revealed that the single largest topic seems to be the COVID-19/corona pandemic.     

Challenges in the adoption of crisis crowdsourcing and social media in Canadian emergency management

When a disaster occurs, government agencies are responsible for managing the response and recovery efforts of the impacted communities and infrastructure. Crowdsourcing and social media are widely used in disaster response, yet their primary implementation and application are often via non-governmental agencies and private citizens. A review of the literature suggests that government emergency management agencies in Canada have made little documented progress in adopting crowdsourcing or social media for emergency management. Most of the literature around crowdsourcing and social media for emergency management focus on its use or role outside of Canada (e.g. the USA, Australia, etc.). In order for government agencies in Canada to progress, it is important to identify the Canada-specific barriers and constraints. This study offers a new perspective from Canadian government emergency management agencies to address this gap. Through a series of semi-structured interviews with 15 government officials from 14 agencies, this study identifies the primary challenges and constraints faced by Canadian agencies looking to adopt crisis crowdsourcing. Results indicate that organizational factors, policies, and federal legislation in Canada present barriers to crisis crowdsourcing (including crowdsourcing through social media) adoption within agencies at various levels of government. Based on these results, recommendations are made to support the adoption of crisis crowdsourcing amongst Canadian government agencies.     

2000-2016年国外突发事件的应急信息管理研究进展

[目的/意义]突发事件的应急信息管理是当前国内外都十分关注的一个跨学科多领域的研究主题,总结国外相关研究文献的研究内容、视角与方法,为国内相关领域的研究提供参考借鉴。[方法/过程]采用文献计量法与内容分析法相结合的方式,按研究内容主题和重点领域对国外突发事件的应急信息管理研究文献进行归纳总结。[结果/结论]从应急信息基本内涵、应急信息沟通、应急信息管理系统和应急信息管理重点领域4个方面着重分析国外突发事件的应急信息管理研究现状,对国内研究的启示包括：应进一步加强跨学科多领域深入研究,加强案例和实证研究,拓展应急信息管理研究内容。     

Build It and They Will Come? Patron Engagement Via Twitter at Historically Black College and University Libraries

This study is a social media analysis on the use of Twitter at Historically Black Colleges and University (HBCU) libraries. While information science researchers have begun examining how libraries use social media, the vast majority of these studies are situated at large flagship research-intensive universities. Additionally, there currently exist deficiencies in research on social media deployment at HBCU libraries. We leverage, the IBM Watson's analytic engine, to systemically examine over 23,000, tweets over an eighteen-month period, around a set of objective measures including propagation of retweets and sentiment to assess follower engagement. The analysis found little evidence of follower engagement with library generated content. However, we observed a substantial volume of library tweets coalesced around institutional boosterism, rather than library related phenomena. This non-library related content represented the vast majority of retweets, but paradoxically was propagated by non-followers. Additionally, tweets relating to institutional boosterism produced the most positive sentiment within the data.     

关于智慧城市与城市应急决策情报体系

[目的/意义] 城市应急管理是当前政府机构和学术界关注的一个重要现实问题。基于智慧城市背景,从情报活动角度考察城市应急决策,对城市应急决策情报体系涉及的若干问题进行"智慧"解读,旨在为该情报体系的设计与实现提供理论指导。[方法/过程] 通过文献资料收集,总结城市应急决策情报体系的研究现状及其不足,并从"智慧"层面透视该情报体系的3个方面内容。[结果/结论] 第一,立足情报本征,情报要素是城市应急决策情报体系中的智慧"源";第二,技术理性与人文价值的整合凸显出城市应急决策情报体系的智慧"核",保证情报有效输出;第三,面向城市应急决策的快速响应情报体系的协同联动机制构建成为智慧"刃",实现情报流动与共享。三方面内容相互交叉、互为关联,并各有侧重,共同成为城市应急决策情报体系"智慧"之所在。     

Twitter Use During TV: A Full-Season Analysis of #serviziopubblico Hashtag

Several recent reports pointed out how the practice of using a “second screen” while following a television program is becoming an increasingly widespread phenomenon. When the secondary device is used to read or to comment about a watched program, most of the discussion takes place on popular social media such as Facebook and Twitter. Previous research has shown that the analysis of these contents could lead to a better understanding of the behavior of networked publics and of the structure of the show itself. Nevertheless most of the existing research is focused on the content only and focused on a single episode analysis or on big media events. Leveraging this background, this article presents instead a study focused on the relationships between content and users across an entire airing season of a TV program. Through a quantitative network analysis of the tweets produced during 25 episodes of the Italian political talks show Servizio Pubblico, we identified a small loyal group of viewers. Despite the differences in quantity of content produced, the loyal viewers do not show any sign of forming a community-like structure. We also performed a qualitative analysis of the tweets produced during one specific episode and discussed the elements of the TV show that generated the higher level of engagement on Twitter.     

Spreading the word? European Union agencies and social media attention

Public agencies need to distribute information to their manifold audience quickly and directly. The emergence of social media platforms has sparked positive projections about future government-public interactions via the internet and almost every EU agency has created social media presences on the leading social media platforms. However, social media accounts of agencies receive strongly varying amounts of public attention and therefore display varying degrees of usefulness to connect with the public. This research examines which factors influence how much long-standing and temporal attention social media accounts of EU agencies receive. Using an extensive Twitter dataset of EU agencies and a new methodology that employs supervised text classification through the novel BERT language model to classify agency tweets, possible explanations of social media attention are tested. Results show that long-standing social media attention (i.e., size of the followership) is mostly explained by salience in traditional news, account age, and tweeting frequency, whilst a more interactive communication style tends to yield more temporal attention (i.e., number of retweets). The findings underline previous assumptions that employing a more interactive communication style maximizes public organizations' potential to connect with their audiences on social media.     

TweetStorm in #ferguson: How News Organizations Framed Dominant Authority,Anti-Authority,and Political Figures in a Restive Community

After Officer Darren Wilson fatally shot African American teen Michael Brown in August 2014, rioters unleashed their anger on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri. Using content analysis and framing theory, this study analyzed how news organizations covered events in Ferguson on Twitter over the course of a month immediately following the shooting. Protesters were framed as troublemakers; but community leaders were not framed as “rabble-rousers.” Journalists continued to rely on official sources more than alternate sources in spite of criticism of law enforcement and other political elites, but nearly 10% of the coded tweets that relied on official sources included some element of skepticism. Tweets from cable news outlets did not show partisan bias in any significant amount; and traditional legacy news media sources utilized the Twitter platform enhancements—such as article links, photos, links to other content, or hashtags—more than their new digital media counterparts. As Twitter launched #ferguson into the national consciousness, it is quite plausible that the framing of the tweets by news agencies may have molded perceptions of larger issues about the racial health of the nation, established policies of law enforcement, and the challenge of elected leaders to resolve explosive domestic problems.     

Political Journalists’ Interaction Networks

This article examines with whom political journalists interact on Twitter and what information they share. These relations are explored by combining a content analysis and a network analysis of interaction patterns. The activities published on journalists’ personal accounts are studied. Prior research has shown that elite journalists, in particular, mainly seek to remain gatekeepers and tend to normalize emerging communication spaces. Only one-quarter of the parliamentary correspondents in the German Federal Press Conference had an individual Twitter profile as of February 2014. The content analysis of all tweets published during a week in March 2014 (N?=?2210) reveals that German political journalists clearly normalize Twitter to fit existing practices: the journalists mostly tweeted about publicly relevant communication and reported in an information-oriented style. Transparency was limited on their topics of interest, and they did not provide direct opportunities for the audience to become more active in the news-creation process. The network analysis shows that the correspondents especially incorporated politicians into their regular circle of contacts. Nevertheless, the interaction networks were clearly dominated by exchanges between journalists. In this way, journalists’ tweets allow us to observe expert talks rather than encouraging users to participate in a discussion.     

Training Versus Monitoring: A Qualitative Examination of Athletic Department Practices Regarding Student-Athletes and Twitter

Twitter has created a number of issues for collegiate athletic programs. Via their tweets, student-athletes have sparked public relations issues for athletic departments and educational institutions. This research examined the messages student-athletes receive from athletic department officials and coaches about Twitter. Semi-structured interviews with 20 student-athletes at a Division I school were conducted. Results revealed that these messages occurred in 1 of 3 areas: (a) (non)training, (b) surveillance/monitoring, and (c) reactive training. The results indicate that student-athletes are left to their interpretations of what constitutes inappropriate Twitter content while also being subjected to monitoring. Education about Twitter typically occurs after a violation of an unclear or unknown policy. This reactionary and ambiguous approach to Twitter appears to be doing little to mitigate controversial tweets. Athletic administrators are encouraged to devote resources to front-end, rather than back-end, training and to define clear boundaries for Twitter usage.     

我国图书馆面向突发公共事件应急服务与管理研究与实践综述

[目的/意义] 旨在对国内图书馆面向突发公共事件应急服务与管理方面的文献进行梳理,分析该领域的研究与实践现状,为日后该领域的研究提供参考。[方法/过程] 以 CNKI 为数据来源,从数据库中选取相关文献,采用内容分析、理论与实践相结合的方法,对有关文献进行全面分析、梳理和归纳,重点分析图书馆面向汶川地震、防控非典、禽流感、甲型H1N1流感以及防控新冠肺炎疫情等突发公共事件的应急服务与管理方面的理论与具体实践。[结果/结论] 不同时期,应对不同类型突发公共事件,图书馆应急服务与管理的内容、方式方法有所不同。从早期意识到突发公共事件对图书馆的影响,到后来图书馆建立应急预案、采取应急措施、开展应急服务,图书馆界面向突发公共事件的服务与管理越来越重要、越来越规范,效果越来越明显。尽管如此,仍存在一些问题和不足,值得进一步研究和探索。     

Assessing library topics using sentiment analysis in R: a discussion and code sample

Abstract

This article discusses the use of R programing language for executing a sentiment analysis of tweets pertaining to library topics. This discussion is situated within the literature of marketing and management sciences, which is employing methods of machine learning and business intelligence to make informed decision-making, and library administration, which has expressed great interest in social media engagement within its literature but has yet to adopt these types of analysis. Presented in this article is a sample code with instructions on how users may execute it within R to retrieve and analyze tweets relevant to library services. Two examples created using the code (analysis of top librarians’ tweets and analysis of posts about major book publishers) are used to demonstrate the functionality of the code. The code presented in this article may be used by libraries to analyze tweets about their library and library-related topics, which, in turn, may inform management and marketing design.     

What do academic libraries tweet about,and what makes a library tweet useful?

People spend an increasing amount of time using social media systems to network, share information, learn, or engage in leisure activities (e.g., gaming). Libraries too are establishing a social media presence to promote the library and provide services to user populations through the social media systems the users frequent. This study explores Twitter uses by six large academic libraries and factors that make library tweets useful. 752 tweets were analyzed by topic to develop a subject typology of library tweets. In addition, tweets and Twitter user characteristics were analyzed to explore what makes library tweets useful, as measured by the number of retweets and favorites received. Content analysis of the samples of library tweets revealed nine content types, with the event and resource categories being the most frequent. In addition, the analysis showed that tweets related to study support services and building and maintaining connections with the library community were the most frequently retweeted and selected as favorites. The presence of a URL in the tweet was positively associated with the number of retweets, and the number of users followed was positively associated with the number of favorites received. Finally, a negative correlation was found between the account age and number of favorites.     

Embeddedness in cross-agency collaboration and emergency management capability: Evidence from Shanghai's urban contingency plans

Governments are increasingly emphasizing emergency management in response to public emergencies that cause extensive consequences and involve multiple government agencies. One of the influential measures adopted by governments is the establishment of cross-agency networks. Scholars have validated the importance of cross-agency collaboration and networks, but only a few studies have examined cross-agency information sharing and utilization mechanism of joint emergency actions. Inspired by the theory of network embeddedness, we study the joint effects of informational and task attributes of embeddedness and absorptive capacity of the leading agency on collaborative emergency capacity. Our data consist of 110 local government contingency plans collected from F District in Shanghai, China. We found that a well-structured cross-agency network and a leading department with great information accessibility will significantly affect the efficiency of emergency collaborations. The capacity to absorb information significantly enhances the improvement of emergency collaboration.     

档案机构微信推文行业辨识度之省思

档案机构微信推文的行业辨识度是档案机构微信质量建设的重要组成部分。文章用例证法从行政性、文化性和娱乐化三方面分析了档案机构微信推文行业辨识度问题产生原因。基于议程设置原理对档案机构微信推文推送优先度提出建议,从"多推档案事"和"多用档案说事"两个角度提出解决档案机构微信推文内容行业辨识度问题的方法,融入历史主义思想和档案表征解决档案机构微信推文形式创新问题。     

Content Analysis of a Live CDC Twitter Chat During the 2014 Ebola Outbreak

A public response to a looming health threat may be marked with misinformation and panic. However, providing the public with accurate information and updates may be an effective way to prevent widespread fear. In response to the 2014 Ebola panic in the United States, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) initiated a Twitter conversation with the public to alleviate concerns and provide accurate information about the disease. This study conducted a content analysis of 512 randomly selected tweets by the general public directed to the CDC. The major themes identified included the etiology of Ebola, policy, the environment, spread and scope of the disease, fear and anxiety from the public, and misinformation. Practical implications of these findings include encouraging government and emergency health response organizations to prepare educational messages and materials in advance that detail responses to common questions, such as transmission and symptoms.     

Integrating records management into information resources management in U.S. government agencies

This article presents several key issues facing federal agencies with regards to electronic records management practices. The article identifies selected management, technology, implementation, and definitional barriers that agencies encounter when considering how to create and maintain an electronic records management process. A key question for federal agency technology managers is: If an enterprise creates and manages virtually all of its information in an automated information technology systems environment, does it make any sense to manage its records in a manual environment? Based on research conducted by the author, the article reviews various federal agency electronic records management processes and the implications for those practices.