Libran Librarian

I’ve heard a lot about MySpace and Facebook and recently had my niece give me a quick tour of her Facebook account.  But it wasn’t until I set up my own Facebook account that I got a better idea of how it works.  So this weeks’ exercise has been useful for me in that I now have a better understanding of what many of our users especially the undergrads are doing in their social spaces. 

In Facebook, I tried to search for people I knew from university and high school but didn’t find anyone.  I then tried to search for the children of my friends and relatives and to my surprise I found most of them.  So Facebook definitely has appeal for the 14 to 25ish year olds.  I  also saw that most of them had limited access to their profiles which is probably a good thing for them in terms of their privacy.

After doing this exercise, I started to wonder what role the Library could have in these online social spaces.  The article by Meredith Farkas, “Libraries in Social Networking Software” was very thought provoking.   The author basically suggests that if libraries want to be in these social spaces they had better do it in a way that is really useful to their users.  Otherwise, it’s probably not worth doing it.  Hopefully there will be more information on the users perspective of the presence of libraries in these online social networks.   

During the past week, I took a look at a few of the web-based applications listed in the week 8 assignment.  I started with RedKid.net, the one “just for fun”.  And it is fun but I don’t expect to have a lot of use for it.   Basecamp sounded promising so I tried it out.  I set up an account (free one) and did a simple TO DO list after viewing the audio/video tutorial.  Although the site was a little less intuitive than I’d like, I hope to explore it further as I think it will be useful for me.  The application I spent the most time playing with was lastfm.  I’d heard about it at one of the OLA sessions I had attended in early February and had been wanting to check it out.  This assignment gave me that opportunity.  Initially I felt some frustration with this site as I could not navigate it easily – I couldn’t remember where things were that I had used on previous visits.  Although the site offers the advantage of connecting with people with similar musical interests as one’s own, I have been enjoying discovering artists similar to the one’s I like as suggested by lastfm.  The business of “scrobbling” and how it is done became clearer to me after I read the FAQ (which I didn’t find for a while).  I will definitely spend more time with this application.