Public libraries on TikTok – emerging platform vernaculars of communication and distribution

Libraries have long embedded social media platforms into their work practices, TikTok being a comparatively new addition. After its international launch, TikTok quickly became a popular platform, especially a space for ‘book talk’, called BookTok. The literature on libraries and TikTok is sparse, and little research has been done to investigate actual TikTok usage by libraries systematically. There is also a methodological advancement to be made in how to approach hashtags as chains when analyzing social media content. In this paper, we explore how Norwegian public libraries use TikTok, employing a dataset of 3248 posts as the basis for our analysis. The study combines digital methods approaches for data collection and analysis with traditional knowledge organization approaches, focusing on hashtags and hashtag chains as part of the complex socio-technical and algorithmic system. Our study has focused on the interpretive possibilities of hashtags as a constitutive element of the platform vernacular. We find that libraries contribute to the ongoing construction and maintenance of BookTok and LibraryTok, and the intersection of these sides through book recommendations and events. We further introduce the concept of daisy chains, signifying a deliberate but unsystematic tactic of tagging posts, part of the platform vernacular, serving the dual act of influencing distribution and communication in a complex algorithmic system.