A: There is a growing trend among librarians working with special collections to use social media in order to highlight the visual-side of their collections. Social media has the power to reach beyond the users who make special trips to visit rare books. To increase visibility, special collections librarians working within North American Universities from such institutions as McGill University (@mcgill_rare), University of Toronto (@fisherlibrary), Queens University (@jordan_library), University of Chicago (@uchicagoscrc) and Yale University (@beineckelibrary) are using Instagram to highlight illustrations from their rare books and archives. 

Hired on a contract-basis in 2018-2019 as Curator of Rare Books and Special Collections at Saint Paul University got me thinking about social media. Which insights could I adopt from my image browsing research to enhance contextual browsing in a social media platform which aims to bring collections out of hiding?

While taking into account the skepticism amongst colleagues on the use of social media for discovering book illustrations, I initiated a collaborative social media initiative at the Jean-Léon Allie Library and Archives. While working with the rare and old books there, I quickly noted the social media potential for the rich illustrated content, which includes illustrations of Saints. Head Librarian, Jérémie LeBlanc, enthusiastically suggested the scale of the project: a French/English site exclusively dedicated to Saints with an image posted per day of the week. Using a number of skills–sleuthing alongside metadata workflow strategies and collaboration–I identified and gathered illustrated books dating as far back as the 16th century so that they could be photographed by photo enthusiast LeBlanc. Based on my reflections on research findings and experience with visual resources, I knew that the documentation stage required data management. We essentially needed to maintain the contextual integrity of hundreds of images and their traceability to their analogue sources. The resulting shots included book covers and two-page layouts and metadata strategies became necessary. As a result, cropped images could linked back to the books themselves.

The next step involved collaborating with library assistants, Maryse Kiese and Lina Harper; my colleagues and I contributed to the image editing, templates, the creation of bilingual content, hashtags, and an automation strategy using Hootesuite. The resulting Instagram site called @alliesaints started the work of letting the world know that Saint Paul University has approximately 30,000 rare book holdings in religious studies and related fields with numerous images of Saints.