I'm getting to this post a little bit late, but here we go. I joined facebook in 2004 back when it was "the" facebook. It was just starting out and one of my friends told me that Wisconsin students had their own network and I should join and be her friend. I hadn't ever joined Friendster, but I was on MySpace for a while in 2003. Nobody else that I knew was on so I deactivated my account.
Now that facebook applications are a reality, I feel like the possibilities for libraries are endless. I've become a fan of the two campus libraries where I've done practicums and now I'm able to get news from them. Many academic librarians I know who have facebook pages have applications including WorldCat, JSTOR, their del.icio.us account, their flickr account, etc. I like the concept of finding library users where they are, and college students are on facebook. All the time. It's cool that public libraries have their own pages and you can become fans of them. I'm sure people would use facebook to look up the hours of the Appleton Public Library if they knew that they could. Although I've been mostly talking about facebook, MySpace also has possibilties and it seems like at this point more libraries are on MySpace because it's older. We'll see what happens as facebook continues to gain popularity and articles like this are published.
Also - I LOVE Scrabulous and play all the time. I've even got a game going right now with Liberty Place Librarian :)
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2 comments:
Thanks, Emily, for your perspective as a long-time social network users.
Many of the PP participants wrote in their blogs that libraries should focus on their website and not split their time between keeping up a social networking site and a library website.
What do you think of that? I'm curious, given the example you gave of hours is something that most libraries currently have on their websites.
I think that since the majority of public library users are not of the MySpace/Facebook generation, it probably does make more sense to just keep up a website instead of a page on a social networking site. I see the point that most people made in their blog posts, I guess I'm more coming from the perspective of an academic library user.
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