won’t bother with paper feedback forms, but they just might be inclined to submit com- ments electronically. If even a handful of stu- dents find the library in a social network and use its services as a result, isn’t it worth it?
WHAT’S NEXT?
Initially most of our “friends” in both MySpace and Facebook were other libraries around the country. We’re all experimenting, and explor- ing the profiles of other libraries is one of the best ways to get ideas and learn what is possi- ble. (If your library has a profile in either ser- vice, send us a friend request!) Students at the University of Kentucky are primarily Facebook users. We expect to see more MySpace usage as high school students with elaborate profiles established in that service go off to college, but for now we are seeing more activity in our Facebook account. After our profile was estab- lished and had a certain amount of content,
the next step was to attract friends. We decided not to solicit directly to students. There is some question about whether students would see that as an invasion of “their space.” Our strategy
was to send friend requests to students we knew
(primarily library student workers) and faculty
at UK who had Facebook profiles. We also sent
a friend request to the Wildcat mascot, who
has a Facebook account. Once our profile
became linked to those profiles, the friends of
our friends were able to discover the library
profile and several new students sent us friend
requests as a result. We combined this less
aggressive form of direct advertising with other
methods, such as promoting our Facebook pro-
file during student orientation sessions. Our
profile is still fairly new, but we are seeing slow
and steady growth in the number of UK stu-
dents who have become our friends.
We plan to continue updating our profiles reg- ularly with new content. Two of us are primar- ily responsible to maintaining the profiles in both services, but we have recruited help from several other librarians in the system to con- tribute content. In addition to basic contact information and tips on using the library, we regularly add items that we hope will be of interest to students. At the beginning of the fall semester, we included tips for new stu- dents as well as information about obtaining and activating the campus ID card. We linked to some tips for using Facebook wisely and featured information about a campus safety seminar which discussed responsible use of Facebook. We have created a series of photo albums to give the site some color, including
an album of sketches of the future Information Commons, a collection of cam- pus banners on display in Young Library, and a fun series of librarians on vacation and just generally having fun.
In general, we strive to keep up with what’s new. Today’s number one site may be MySpace, but it will inevitably be replaced by
something else. Just a few years ago, Friendster was the hottest social networking site around. Mention it to a student today and you may
get a blank look or “ugh, that’s where my big sister’s friends used to hang out.”
Social networking sites give libraries just another option to reach our clientele in new ways. As we utilize these new tools, it makes
us realize that it is truly an exciting time to be in this profession.