I really don't like Facebook. I did have an account & got so fed up with the whittering & triva- frankly, I don't *care* if you're doing the ironing- coupled with the weird e-mails I started getting from people claiming to be "followers" that I de-activated it. Big plus about this week's "Thing" is that I can do it without having to rejoin.
I've been very good & looked solemnly at good library sites on Facebook - & very nice some of them are (Folger Shakespeare Library, New York Public Library)& thought hard about a plus for a library presence.
My feeling is that Facebook is too much of a social site for serious library presences. Excellent as the above mentioned are, the profiles should be available on the library web-site without having to go through the Facebook channel to find them. Also, "fan" figures suggest that the percentage of people following the Facebook profiles are not high.
Folger Shakespeare Library only has 2038 "Fans", Yale University Library 1,225 & New York Public Library 12,621. These may seem like a lot but these are American sites of very high profile libraries & I would expect figures to be much higher.
In an Oxford context, the student number figures for 2008 were 19,002 full time & 1,328 part time undergraduates & post-graduates. There are currently only 172 "fans" of the Bodleian Centre for the Study of the Book & 176 "fans" of the Bodleian Law Library pages on Facebook.
So, yes to Facebook as a great tool for people to keep in touch with loved ones worldwide, a big fat *no* to updates about your life every 10 seconds (hello to a nameless relative of mine :)) and no to Facebook as a primary engagement tool with library users. Too much work for too little return when resources could be aimed at developing a really stunning library website.
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