Thing 17 - LinkedIn

This week's Thing to explore is LinkedIn and I must say, I'm not particularly enamoured with it. I've had an account for a couple of years (invited yet again to create one by a friend and colleague of mine) but haven't really used it as such. I can appreciate its strength as a purely professional networking tool (exit the frisson of Facebook with its blurred boundaries between work and social life) but have had too many people I barely knew, or didn't know in a professional context, sending me Contact Invitations to not view it with a hefty dose of cynicism at this point - especially since LinkedIn warns us that by accepting the contact invitation, we could potentially be asked to write a reference for this person at some point. Right now LinkedIn seems to me to be the poorer parent of Facebook (more fun) and Twitter (more vibrant), and I'm not sure I can find the time and energy to devote to yet another .

At this stage I'm also starting to suffer from Thing Fatigue (a brand new syndrome currently claiming many victims among the Cambridge librarian population) and while I have enthusiastically embraced several of the previous Things, I simply cannot muster the energy or the enthusiasm for LinkedIn. Will I persevere with it and do my best to reap the benefits of it? Yes, certainly. Will it ever become one of my favourite Things? I strongly doubt it.

Thing 16 - Facebook

As a hopeless Facebook addict who half-heartedly tried and failed to wheen herself off Facebook (neither cold turkey nor gradual withdrawal worked, been there, tried that) due to the widespread concerns over privacy settings and the long-standing rumour that Facebook may one day suddenly start charging for the privilege of being an addict, I thought I knew this tool well. When I first joined Facebook, I set my privacy settings so high that even genuine (outside of Facebook!) friends who were looking for me couldn't find me unless they were friends with one of my friends. Whether this is still the case I'm not sure - Facebook sure seems to be changing its privacy policies fairly regularly and though I try I'm hardly up-to-date with the latest Facebook-induced outrage. I've read all the extra articles posted about this with interest and an inevitable sense of doom.

Setting up our Library page for the 23 Things programme (still a bit bare, but then we're closed at the minute!) actually forced me to look at various policies and I was sobered by what I found there and the acute need for training and increased awareness of Facebook's less friendly side. This starts at a younger age and I know that schools do actively tackle their pupils' acute need for an increased awareness of the pitfalls of posting anything online willy-nilly, apparently protected by the erroneous assumption that "only my friends can read/see this anyway".

I thought I knew a fair bit about the potential benefits to be had from a Library Facebook presence: controlled, reliable information that stays there and is available within a setting that most students already use, that people can flit in and out of without, and that appears magically as part of their status updates (which - let's face it - is what most people use Facebook for, along with sharing photos) instead of asking them to go to a separate page for library information. How wrong was I! A little bit of eavesdropping at one of the 23 Things help sessions ended up opening so many more possibilities promoting resources that my mind has been whirring and working overtime on this since, and I'll be doing a lot more work on our brand new Facebook Library page to promote subject-specific resources and services. Colleagues beware, I may well end up pestering quite a few of you for advice and liaising over resources on Facebook!

To finish off, I found on SlideShare a survey analysis on the use of Library Pages on Facebook, reiterating the importance of having a presence on the social sites our readers use:

Librarians, Libraries And Facebook

View more presentations from Jane Secker.

Take a look and feel free to let me know what your thoughts are!

Thing 7 - Twitter

Now this is one post I was actually very much looking forward to writing! Our Library had agreed a while ago that having a presence on Twitter and Facebook would be beneficial, and we had been planned to set it up this summer, so I took advantage of the 23 Things programme to kill two birds with one stone - check us out at MMLLib!

Personally I am a fan of Twitter, having been introduced to it last year by one of my colleagues who is one of the most enthusiastic Twitter fans I know. I find it an excellent professional tool and use it mainly for professional development, which inevitably involves keeping up to date with what more intelligent people (and wittier) than yours truly have to say on various issues I would probably not bother seeking a regular update on. Interestingly, I've noticed that I've become much more dependent on it since I've set it up on my shiny new BlackBerry, which tends to support Twitter much better than Facebook as I want more out of Facebook than simply the status updates. But beware, Twitter has a very addictive side to it, you won't be able to leave it alone.

One of the drawbacks of having greatly delayed my start on the 23 Things programme is that I missed out on so many interesting comments posted by fellow professionals here in Cambridge: I do find it slightly disheartening to know that the more people you follow, the more likely you are to miss useful/interesting comments due to the sheer volume of information tweeted. For example, it is seriously making me rethink the number of newspapers that I follow on Twitter. Ah, the drawbacks of our information society...

I tend to disagree with LottieMSmith's point that Twitter has more to offer libraries and their students than Facebook: my experience so far, though far less comprehensive and in-depth than hers, is that Twitter works extremely well for us librarians, however I fear that students have not embraced it with the same enthusiasm as us. Having promoted our upcoming Twitter and Facebook presence wherever possible and whenever appropriate to students and staff alike (why let a perfectly good opportunity to promote our Library services go by unattended?), I've noticed more of an interest at the mention of our Facebook page than Twitter. I am not losing hope that they'll see the benefit of it though, and we'll certainly refine our use of both tools to show off how well they complement each other rather than compete with each other. Time will tell if Twitter and Facebook will deliver on their promises for our library, or if our hopes will be cruelly (and very annoyingly) dashed.

I would be interested to know how well Twitter, and Facebook for that matter, will be received by our academics, or if its use will stay confined to the students and library world colleagues. I'll most definitely be watching this space and working hard to integrate Twitter and Facebook as important tools to communicate with the readership we support.