Week 3 -Social Networking

I'm happy the Social Networking instructions were posted early - that way I was able to start this at home on the weekend, which was good, as I'm pretty sure facebook is blocked at work.

I signed up for a facebook account, invited some friends (and I think I invited some people I didn't mean to include, also - won't they be surprised!) and did some looking around. I thought it was fun, but didn't really see how this was going to be work related until I tried the UAB catalog search, the PubMed search and the WorldCat search. WOW Now I see some potential for people who want to connect to the Library from within their facebook accounts! While I'm not sure (yet) what needs to be done on the Library's end to be an "application" - I could see "announcing" new books, faculty publications, and general library news. I also signed up to be part of my workplace's community. Not sure what will happen since this is blocked at work, and I sure hope I don't "get in any trouble."

Next I signed up for LinkedIn. This seemed much more "professional" to me and I felt this was a more appropriate site to investigate, from a personal standpoint. My college-aged daughter feels strongly that facebook should have remained a "college-protected" environment, and I tend to agree with her - or at least I want to support her by not "invading" her "private" space. That being said, though, our users will include people who rely heavily on facebook, and if this is where they want to communicate with us, we need to be poised to do this. Although I found many more "friends" with facebook accounts than with LinkedIn accounts. I saw more potential in communicating with other librarians and professionals from within LinkedIn than from within facebook. But, to optimally use this site, it appears you need to upgrade your membership, for a "small fee." Doubt I'll do that - so LinkedIn is probably out, for now.

I found some myspace pages to be interesting, but, think that this site is not as popular as it used to be. I have a gut feeling that our users, if asked to pick one type of access they would want us to pursue, would pick facebook....

One of the questions I know we're supposed to answer is "How can social networking be used by MLA to connect members?" Well, I think MLA could be a facebook application and MLA members could add this application to their profiles. I also think they could easily be set up as a group within LinkedIn, but, my growing concern, now, is how to keep up with everything that I'm now creating and learning? There's the blog, and the wiki, and now facebook and LinkedIn, and we're only at the beginning of Week 3! How many things can we keep adding and keep doing them well? I think this will be a major challenge. I don't think, as libraries, we want to create a bunch of new access methods and then let them slide, or not stay current, relevant and meaningful to our users.

An observation - it's been 5 days since I wrote the above post. Other than the library "friends" I connected with as part of the assignment, I have found few other friends in either facebook or LinkedIn. The ones I did find still have not responded to me, which leads me to believe that perhaps these tools are not being used as much as they once were, or they aren't being used as much for professional, non-social functions. While I found exposure to these sites to be worthwhile, I'm not sure how often I will "check in" to see what's going on - at least for now...