What do the US West Coast Public Libraries Post on Twitter?
Amir Karami, Matthew Collins

TL;DR
This study analyzes over 138,000 tweets from US West Coast public libraries to identify their main content topics, revealing a focus on public relations and book-related events through computational topic modeling.
Contribution
It introduces a novel computational approach using Twitter API and topic modeling to analyze large-scale social media content of public libraries, filling a gap in existing research.
Findings
20 distinct topics identified
Libraries focus on public relations and book events
Provides insights for strategic social media use
Abstract
Twitter has provided a great opportunity for public libraries to disseminate information for a variety of purposes. Twitter data have been applied in different domains such as health, politics, and history. There are thousands of public libraries in the US, but no study has yet investigated the content of their social media posts like tweets to find their interests. Moreover, traditional content analysis of Twitter content is not an efficient task for exploring thousands of tweets. Therefore, there is a need for automatic methods to overcome the limitations of manual methods. This paper proposes a computational approach to collecting and analyzing using Twitter Application Programming Interfaces (API) and investigates more than 138,000 tweets from 48 US west coast libraries using topic modeling. We found 20 topics and assigned them to five categories including public relations, book,…
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