Social Networking [Facebook] and Libraries

Our textbook’s chapter on social networking talks abundantly about MySpace and briefly about Facebook. Back in 2006 Facebook was relatively new, but so much has changed since then in the social networking world. According to a recent Pew Internet report, Social Networking Sites and Our Lives, “Facebook is the nearly universal social networking site and it has the highest share of users’ daily visits, while MySpace and LinkedIn are occasional destinations.”

These are some of Facebook statistics:

·         More than 800 million active users

·         More than 50% of active users log on to Facebook in any given day

·         Average user has 130 friends

·         On average, more than 250 million photos are uploaded per day

·         More than 900 million objects that people interact with (pages, groups, events and community pages)

·         Average user is connected to 80 community pages, groups and events

·         On average, more than 250 million photos are uploaded per day

·         More than 70 languages available on the site

·         More than 75% of users are outside of the United States

·         Over 300,000 users helped translate the site through the translations application

While researching for this assignment I came across the article Twitter and Facebook for User Collection Requests by Joan Petit, published in Collection Management, Volume 36, Issue 4, 2011. The author talks about the advantages of using social networking for libraries and gives examples of libraries and business using Facebook and other social networking site. One of the examples involved NYPL, the subject of my marketing critique paper.

“In April 2011, the social media–oriented New York Public Library began recruiting volunteers to help transcribe 10,000 digitized menus from its historical restaurant menus collections to make the materials fully searchable. The library promoted the project solely through Facebook, Twitter, and the Web site MetaFilter. As of three months later, thousands of volunteers had already transcribed more than 450,000 dishes from more than 8,500 menus. The New York Public Library menu project thus has become an outstanding example of how a library can use social media first to promote a collection and then also to build and improve that very same collection.”

Libraries presence in social networking sites shouldn’t be in question; or would you question if a library should have a website, or a phone number, or an address? Social networking sites are an important part of the mix of efforts libraries should make to serve and reach their patrons.