By Jill Reilly James (Director of Social Media, U.S. National Archives)
Tumblr is a blogging/microblogging community. The Tumblr environment is visually rich, and community members are enthusiastic about photography, design, art, crafting, and fashion. There is an active community interested in history, vintage design, and archival photos, so the response to archival content shared by the archives and libraries has been positive.
Sharing content is a key activity on the site, and in some ways Tumblr serves as a hub connecting content from other social media platforms and communities like Flickr and other blogs. You can share a text post, photo, quote, link, chat transcript, audio recording, or video. Many of the most active members of the community consider themselves curators or editors of content on the topics they share, and some become official Tumblr editors. You can like (heart) and even reblog a post from another blog so it appears on your own blog. Some, but not all, blogs have Q&A, comment, and submit a post features included, too. Tumblr highlights the number of notes (total of likes and reblogs combined) a post gets and doesn’t publicly show how many followers a Tumblr blog has.
If one of your archives’ target audiences is already on Tumblr or you would like to raise the Tumblr community’s awareness of your archives, then you should consider setting up an official Tumblr to share finds from your holdings and collections. Many brands, organizations, and a good number of cultural institutions are joining this fast-growing community. Every Tumblr blog is a little unique, but most organizations are looking to connect with the Tumblr community by posting visually appealing content that is noteworthy, quirky or hip, and something you can’t resist passing on. The Peace Corps Tumblr blog shares riveting photography and engaging promotional materials from the past and present. The New York Public Library Wire on Tumblr announces events and posts finds from their special collections.
The National Archives aims to offer some historical surprises and curiosities to capture the imagination of the Tumblr community interested in the past and increase engagement with our projects. Our strategy on Tumblr has been to focus on content and pilot topical blogs related to projects or ongoing activities, which fits with our larger social media strategy for tapping into existing communities with an interest in historical content. With Today’s Document on Tumblr we share the current document of the day, also featured in our Today’s Document mobile app, and invite the public and the Archives staff to suggest National Archives documents and photos to be featured in a refreshed version of the app. Similarly, our I Found It in the National Archives blog encourages the public to submit or tag posts for us to consider for our local version of the Society of American Archivists’ I Found It in the Archives! Contest. We share photographs that reveal what the Archivist of the United States and the Presidential Libraries have been up to lately and link to more content on our Archives.gov blogs, Flickr streams, or Facebook pages. Our National Archives Exhibits blog highlights the killer content from our latest exhibit and uses tags to attract the attention of Tumblr members who have an interest in the exhibit’s topics. We’ve been happy with the engagement on Tumblr.
A lot of archives have great treasures and fascinating finds to share with the Tumblr community. Check it out, and happy tumbling!
Tasks
1. Strategize
2. Get Your Tumblr Started
3. Tap into the Tumblr Community
Blog Prompts
Resources