RIP @JordanhillLib – the end of a library told through social media

A library full of books (photo by Lynne Marshall)

A few weeks later

The University of Strathclyde is centralising onto one campus this summer. As part of the procedure, Jordanhill Library closed on 1st June and was emptied within a few short weeks. This was an emotional wrench for me, having worked there over two decades, so I decided to create my own little archive. I tweeted the whole procedure as @JordanhillLib so that staff and students were kept up-to-date with progress, but tweets disappear off the horizon quickly and, now that the account has morphed into @StrathLibHaSS (HaSS = Faculty of Humanities & Social Sciences), they’d be more or less irretrievable anyway. I’ve blogged about Jordanhill in other places, my travel blog and children’s literature blog, but it was two new (to me) tools that really came into their own.

Pinterest I signed up to this a while ago, but hadn’t really done anything with it until it occurred to me it would be a wonderful tool to document the closure of the library and collect memories. My Farewell Jordanhill board is a mixture of current photographs and archive material.

Storify Again, I had been aware of this tool but not used it much. However, I made two Jordanhill Storifies (Storifys?) – one about the Library’s last day, when we served cake to all our visitors, and one about the campus closing ceremony a couple of weeks later. Storify goes some way to solve the problem, mentioned above, of preserving tweets.

It’s wonderful these days how, with very little technical expertise, you can create good-looking web pages using these tools. Obviously, there is no guarantee that they will last for ever though so I have my photographs all backed up – I’m not daft. And I’ll always have the memories!