I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords.
The ARChive of Contemporary Music website features many image galleries depicting items from the collection, including great album and book covers, 45-rpm adaptors, punk flyers and more. Since the launch of the site in May 2014, web traffic to the galleries has been relatively low, about a third of the number of users that hit the homepage. The ARC’s social media posts also have relatively low reach and low engagement (e.g., average interaction per tweet = 1).
As an ARC employee and the developer of the ARC website, I thought that by repurposing interesting, fun, and quirky digital content in the context of social media, perhaps we could better engage followers, attract new users, and drive new traffic to the site, potentially attracting new donors to the non-profit archive.
This was my idea when I was dreaming up a final project for LIS 664 – Programming for Cultural Heritage. By the end of the semester, I had written some Python scripts that, in conjunction with free web services, allowed me to put this idea to the test. Continue reading Tumblr Image Bot: A friendly social media robot