It’s factual — the library does, in fact, carry books. It’s humorous and off-beat. It’s part of a meme trend that Amtrak (“trains”), NPR (“radio”) and even President Joe Biden (“democracy”) eventually hopped on. And it’s the work of Luke Martin who, since June 2020, has run the library’s social media and helped define a voice that is “a little bit sassy at times, a little bit unserious at times, a little bit silly at times,” and always a niche icon of the region.
Martin, originally from Woodbury, N.J., found himself in Albany, and specifically in the world of libraries, by way of graduate school. While pursuing his master’s degree at New York University, he began interning at a special collections library focused on New York City’s 1970’s and ’80’s art scene. When he arrived in the Capital Region to pursue his doctorate in English at the University at Albany, he picked up a part-time job at the Bach Branch, then another one at the Howe Branch, where he eventually took a full-time job over finishing his dissertation.
The opportunity to take on the role of public information specialist, Martin’s current title, came at the start of the pandemic. Armed with his wit, writing skills and informal graphic design training from creating flyers for bands he was in and academic conferences he organized, Martin brought his love of libraries and the communities they create online.
The following Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: Did the voice of the Albany Public Library’s social media change a lot when you took it over?
A: This position was empty for a little bit of time. And so my supervisor, among all the other things that she’s responsible for, was trying to be on social as well, which is tough. And to be honest, you know, I think we were afforded a little bit of a luxury when I started. When I got the position, of course, first thing you do, especially coming from an academic background, is consume as many library accounts as possible, see what are they doing. And the simple fact is, so many libraries, even ones of our size, lack the resources to have someone who is able to devote really any time to social media. And so what you see is, for many library systems, social media is the 10th job that a librarian has, or a library worker has. Luckily, it’s like only my fifth or something like that, so I can actually devote some time to it, which is nice. (The voice) definitely did change. It took a while.
Q: You said social media is the fifth job you have — what are your other four jobs?
A: So the thing that takes up probably the most time is designing program materials across all branches: creating flyers and getting library copy for every single one of those programs and then doing TV slides for each of them. And then quarter sheets, regular-sized flyers, sometimes sandwich board flyers — all of that takes up a lot of time. All the print material is on me as well. All the library signage is me, bookmarks, anything you might pick up here.
Then I handle little things, too, like updating the website, which is probably … like seven or eight on the responsibilities list. … I think this is why Twitter works so well because I just fit it into the interstitial of my day. Like, I just send it out into the world, and then I move on to the next thing.
Q: You started to talk a little bit about how you figured out what the library’s voice was going to be on social media. I’d love to hear more about that process.
A: Coming into this position, one of the risks in leaving my job at the Howe Branch that I had, just from a personal perspective, was that I just enjoyed working on the library floor so much and getting those social interactions every day that I knew being up here in this office, for example, I wouldn’t quite get. Just interacting with the community in a genuine and fun and trusting and sometimes serious ways — I was going to miss that, and so this was an opportunity to use social media to sort of still do that, but do it online.
I wanted to keep interacting with the people I see every day, and and not just our patrons and our community members, but also our staff. And so I also use this as an opportunity to reflect the voices of the staff sometimes. A lot of the stuff just come from literally walking down the hallway and stuff … the content of the social media is genuinely like a sponge reflection of all of the things that are just happening around here. It’s kind of nice and makes my job easy because all I have to do is listen closely and then filter things through through my voice.
There’s a perception that libraries need to be neutral vessels of information, that they’re just buildings or the social media account should be an objective, person-less voice. … I don’t think that needs to be the case. I think we can try to serve everyone while also acknowledging that there’s a voice here. We don’t need to erase the personhood of of the account. I like that people interact with our account in a way that they seem to know that there’s someone laboring or there is a person behind it. There are feelings to it.
I think to our Free Comic Book Day. We were really disappointed when we found out we weren’t getting our free comic books for Free Comic Book Day. I made a post that genuinely had pathos to it, that had the contours of our feelings about it with a little bit of humor as well. Then a lot of people shared that, and we ended up getting a huge amount of support and a Marvel writer reached out to come and help us with it … who’s to say whether or not if I had just posted that Free Comic Book Day was cancelled, maybe that would have gained steam and people would have seen it and interacted with it in a real human and supportive way. But probably not, right? I think while there are some risks to taking on the voice, which is a little bit sassy at times, a little bit unserious at times, a little bit silly at times, there are also like definitely rewards in terms of building community and gaining people’s trust and feeling online the way people feel down on the floor when they come and interact with our our libraries and staff.
Q: It looks like you’re doing a lot of digging into the archives for the 100th anniversary celebration. What have been some of your favorite finds?
A: So our institutional archive is sort of untouched. … We’ve always been such a lean organization. It’s been a while since we’ve had a full-time local history librarian, and we haven’t had been able to devote resources to being the custodian of our own history. Someone came to me and was like, “Do you want to go through this stuff?” With the knowledge that I was a working processing archivist for two years, it gave me an ability to say, “Yes, I will, I can take care of this archive and not utterly destroy it, or disorganize it, or anything else.”
One of the favorite things that I found: so I have the VHS collection that I’ve been going through. Last week, I came across teen talent show videos from the ’80’s. So starting in 1984, Burger King sponsored a rap contest, a library rap contest. And the submissions are awesome. I was so impressed by what some of these teens could do. For two years, it’s specifically a rap contest, then it seemingly just transitioned to a teen talent contest.
Q: Is there anything else you want to touch on about the work that you’ve done?
A: It was nice doing this because I got a chance to reflect a little bit and think about what the past few years have been. And it’s so funny, I hadn’t looked at the Twitter feed from last year or any old content. I was briefly looking through, searching for keywords and stuff. It’s been fun. I’m glad to see that more people are paying attention now. I had some quality jokes back early in the day that I might need to revisit.
Q: Did a particular post from your past stand out?
A: I think the most ridiculous thing that — it’s funny because not many people engaged with this — was there was a news article about privatizing the moon; that developer or entrepreneur want to privatize the moon. And because I have library-coded glasses on… I don’t know how to best describe it, I literally see the world through the lens of libraries and books, it’s maybe a little bit of a disease at this point. But the first thought that came to my mind was the book “Good Night, Moon,” which is a classic children’s book. And so I was like, “I’m gonna Photoshop this to say ‘Privatize the Moon,’ ” and I rewrote the whole story.