FH Library launches on Instagram

Eva Schameitat: We want to reach all of our target groups with the channel. First of all, of course, there are the students and employees of Fachhochschule Dortmund. But external people also use our library, for example students from other universities. We also want to address them with the channel, just like prospective students or potential new employees.

Johanna Munkelt: On the one hand, we share news and information about our services and activities. On the other hand, we also want to take a look behind the scenes of the library and show how and what we are working on. We will also present particularly exciting new media. Overall, we are planning a mixture of informative and entertaining content. For example, there may be a story in which we draw attention to training dates and then another post with a historical photo from the library. Our aim is also to surprise our users from time to time, because we keep finding that many people are not even aware of some of the things we do - so we want to use Instagram to change that. It should be varied and we want to incorporate lots of different ideas, including from our colleagues.

Eva Schameitat: When it comes to new services and important changes, we are always faced with the question of how we can best keep our users up to date. The coronavirus pandemic has intensified this once again, as new regulations often have an impact on the library, often at short notice. But also because we have expanded our digital offering in this context and created online alternatives for our training and advisory services and want to make this known. Our website and our Twitter channel, which has been in place for several years, are not always sufficient. Instagram is a good additional way for us to reach younger target groups in particular - via a platform that they like to use anyway. We can also get creative, try out new things, communicate with images and videos instead of just text and invite our users to interact more.

Johanna Munkelt: Yes, of course. You can ask us general questions about the library and the things we post about directly via Instagram. However, for more specific or individual questions, for example about loan periods, we refer you to our email address bibfh-dortmundde  we have to do this from time to time because the two of us can't answer every question about our complex range of services, sometimes we need the expertise of other colleagues. As we maintain the channel during our working hours, we are unfortunately unable to respond at all times. But we do our best to respond to everything as quickly as possible.