Social Media In the Context of Library and Information Science: A necessary tool for Librarians in the 21st Century

The Journey so far has been an interesting one with new grounds of exploration. The first week of the CPD programme has come and gone and it didn't leave without making a super print on the sand of KNOWLEDGE.The importance of the Social in Libraries today cannot be said to be overemphasized as our users have now shifted to these new platforms hence the library too as a growing has to conform. This issue was further buttressed by Dr. Cecilia Penzhorn as she did justice to "Social Media In Theory and Practice". However as the biblical saying that you cannot lit a lamp and put it under the table, surely it will not shine. Prof. Omwayo Bosire Onyancha, did open our eyes on "Biblio- and AltMetrics in the LIS Work Place With  Special Reference to Libraries". The need for Librarians and Academics to publish in high impact factor journals was brought to the fore. Because of the infiltration of social media into librarianship, the traditional citation index method have now been upgraded to a newer level which is the use of AltMetrics which includes the following: - Plum Analytics, PLOS, SCOPUS for citation analysis, SCIELO, all these tools have the strength to draw up citation indexes from all social media together. In order to further equip librarians with social media tools, Carike Schoeman did a good job in putting us through Facebook and Twitter, We had a wonderful Visit to the National Library of South Africa, (NLSA). I really commend the government and people of South Africa for this foresight. Prof. Archie L. Dick really did justice to The research process African Research Rising! He gave us an insight on how to come up with a fruitful research, a step by step guide on writing research. Afterwards we visited UNISA library which is one of the biggest in the country serving hundreds of thousands of users.