Libraries and social networking: impact and challenges in today's generation

Editor's Notes

1. Social networking is one of the most active web-based activities in the Philippines, with Filipinos being declared as the most active users on a number of web-based social network sites such as Friendster and Multiply. The use of social networking website has become extensive in the Philippines that the country has been tagged as "The Social Networking Capital of the World," and has also become part of Filipino cyberculture. Social networking is also used in the Philippines as a form of election campaign material, as well as tools to aid criminal investigation. A study released by Universal McCann entitled "Power To The People - Wave3" declared the Philippines as "the social networking capital of the world," with 83 percent of Filipinos surveyed are members of a social network. They are also regarded as the top photo uploaders and web video viewers, while they are second when it comes to the number of blog readers and video uploaders.[3] With over 7.9 million Filipinos using the Internet, 6.9 million of them visit a social networking site at least once a month. Meanwhile, Multiply president and founder Peter Pezaris said that the Filipino users of their site comprised the largest and most active group in terms of number of subscribers and of photographs being uploaded daily. About 2.2 million out of more than nine million registered users of Multiply are Filipinos, outnumbering even nationalities with a bigger population base like the United States, Indonesia, and Brazil. Also, one million photographs are uploaded by Filipinos to Multiply every day, which is half of their total number worldwide.[7] Sixty percent of Filipino users of Multiply are female, while 70 percent are under the age of 25. In comparison, Filipino Friendster users are between the ages 16 to 30, with 55 percent of them female.[7
2. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library has established a Myspace page which acts as a portal leading back to the library website. They have even created a library catalog search box which other MySpace members can add to their own profiles. By establishing a presence in a community which their patrons already interact in, they are making themselves more visible and accessible to a large demographic of potential users.
3. MySpace Austin Public Library provides their Mission Statement.
4. The University of Central Florida promotes their Ask a Librarian service through their MySpace page.
5. MySpace Free Library of Philadelphia, a clean and simple design
6. MySpace Free Library of Philadelphia, a clean and simple design
7. MySpace American Library Association account
8. MySpace The American Library Association has incorporated other services into their site such as You Tube clips and Instant Messaging with Meebo.
9. MySpace Blog entries, Customized URL, Song, About Me sections
10. MySpace Interests, Who we’d like to meet, Calendar and Friend’s Space
11. Beyond academia, librarians are using social networks to network with other librarians and keep up with new happenings in the LIS field. There are over 2,500 librarians who belong to the Ning Library 2.0 social network in which librarians are chatting in forums, blogging, uploading photos and videos, and making connections.
12. Librarians such as Lois Coleman of Barnard College are going where the users are and reaching out to students through their Facebook profiles. You can see that she is encouraging students to send her their tricky reference questions.
13. A host of academic libraries have created Facebook applications which enable their patrons to search their library catalogs and in some cases articles from within Facebook. Facebook applications have been such a huge hit with members that they have accounted for a 37% increase in activity between May when the feature was released and August of this year.
14. LibraryThing is an online service to help people catalog their books easily. You can access your catalog from anywhere—even on your mobile phone. Because everyone catalogs together, LibraryThing also connects people with the same books, comes up with suggestions for what to read next, and so forth. LibraryThing is a full-powered cataloging application, searching the Library of Congress, all five national Amazon sites, and more than 80 world libraries. You can edit your information, search and sort it, "tag" books with your own subjects, or use the Library of Congress and Dewey systems to organize your collection. How can libraries use LibraryThing? Fully integrate LibraryThing's social data into your catalog using LibraryThing for Libraries. LTFL lets you add tag-based browsing, book recommendations, ratings, reviews and more to your OPAC, by integrating with LibraryThing and its high-quality book data. can use LibraryThing as a catalog for their collection.
15. Blogs are websites with dated items of content in reverse chronological order, self-published by bloggers. Items – sometimes called posts - may have keyword tags associated with them, are usually available as feeds, and often allow commenting. There are now more than 112 million blogs Blogs can be hosted by dedicated blog hosting services, or they can be run using blog software, such as WordPress, Movable Type, Blogger or LiveJournal, or on regular web hosting services.
16. The Kelvin Smith Library at Case Western Reserve University blogs about library news such as database changes, university receptions, and digital video acquisitions.
17. The Binghampton University library has initiated a business blog on which they blog about electronic reference resources, business database news, and statistical sources.
18. The librarians at Williams College created a library welcome video for new students which leads them on a mystery tour of the library. They have it hosted up on YouTube. It's an engaging way to introduce new students to the campus library as well as to its librarians.
19. Flickr is a photo sharing website with an online community platform. It was one of the earliest Web 2.0 applications. In addition to being a popular Web site for users to share personal photographs, the service is widely used by bloggers as a photo repository. Its popularity has been fueled by its innovative online community tools that allow photos to be tagged and browsed by folksonomic means. It hosts over two billion images
20. The Colorado College Tutt & Coburn Libraries displays its special collection of photographs of the college libraries dating back to the nineteenth century and makes it available to the public thru Flickr.
21. University of Minnesota Libraries is using… PMWiki to create a staff intranet It is a centralized repository of organizational knowledge With over 3,000 pages including instructions for signing up for library listservs, travel policies, library division pages, and organizational charts. Because wikis allow uploading & storing files, they are able to provide HR forms, and authorization forms, for their employees to download
22. The Antioch University New England Library staff has created a Training & Support Wiki Using SeedWiki The have Library opening and closing procedures, instructions for using the ILS, book processing information, phone operations, time sheets, and log-in troubleshooting.
23. Ohio University Libraries has combined their marketing, general, and international business subject guides in one place to create BizWiki A searchable & easily updatable resource for patrons which anyone can edit. Using Media Wiki, they have created this information resource about business databases and resources, instructional articles on how to research companies, guides to various industries, FARQs
24. Organizations are using them for conference planning – an informal space to have information about speakers' and attendees schedules, dining information, tagging and twitter information. This is the ALA annual conference wiki.
25. Wikis can also be used as resource reviews collections Which is what the Butler University Libraries are doing with... Seed wiki They have over 130 Reviews of databases, books, websites, and style guides that are part of their Reference collection
26. And librarians are using them for best practices collections, such as on the lib success wiki, also the library instruction wiki is a collection of all the best resources for instructional librarians, etc.
27. WikiPilipinas is now the biggest collaborative writing project on the Philippines.
28. PAARLWiki is a project I spearheaded to provide our community of library information professionals with sources available locally and through the Internet, particularly on research articles, case studies, lecture presentations, technical reports, etc. on Philippine librarianship. In addition, I added more online information on library standards, profiles of various library organizations in the country, and outstanding librarians. I also uploaded many useful links on anything that is library-related, or may be useful to libraries.