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.