Facebook

Ah - facebook. There are a couple of reasons why I like facebook. There is the networking potential with other library colleagues. Also from the people connection standpoint, this site has been great with finding friends from high school who I have not seen in ages. While I've been able to locate more people from my past and present on myspace, there is a gap in that some people sign up for either one social networking site versus another. Facebook has a wide range of applications that are really easy to add versus myspace which tends to be a little bit more difficult to add applications. In addition to the networking benefit of facebook in a workplace setting there is also the opportunity to find out more about your co-workers which is especially beneficial in a large library/company. People place pictures and descriptions of themselves on facebook and it allows you to peer into their personal world which is sometimes difficult in a real life work setting. Also, reading comments from other people about the individual also adds insight and often laughter.

As for a library being on facebook, it is definitely a way to make oneself visible to a demographic and that is generally college students. For an academic library especially, there holds potential in facebook. The question is with this visibility, what can a library post or display that would interest facebook/library users and keep them coming back? There are event feeds for NSU and perhaps this is one way we could utilize this visibility. Honestly though, if I see things that are not related to my friends, I often ignore them. This is just me and other people's information scanning habits are different, but one must wonder how can a library best market itself in this medium? This is my question to now ponder.