The content disseminated on social media by public secondary school libraries as a reflection of society: The case of the Extremadura region of Spain

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the type of content disseminated by school libraries through social media and what topics are the most commonly used, to discover if, in addition to topics concerning libraries, information with a wide social scope is also disseminated.

This paper reviews the use of social media as well as the implementation of a content analysis on the most used 2.0 platforms, to locate which content is the most relevant in the school libraries of public secondary schools in Extremadura.

In the Extremadura region of Spain, the results of the 752 publications posted during the period 2014-2017 by the libraries of the 86 public secondary schools on six selected social media platforms generated a total of 4 categories and 14 subcategories, and point to a predominance of topics related to encouraging and promoting reading and writing, and to the library’s support function for both the classroom and the school. However, shortcomings are detected in content related to social aspects of special interest, such as bullying or education in equality.

The originality of this paper lies in the fact that although there are some works on the analysis of the content of the social web of libraries in general, especially university libraries, the same does not apply to the evaluation of social media in school libraries, and much less about the analysis of social media content in these types of libraries.