An Academic Library's Facebook Experience

As an academic librarian, I’m more drawn to Facebook than to MySpace for the purpose of patron outreach.  Last year, I discovered Facebook, created an account and started poking around.  I noticed there were several library profiles in there, particularly academic libraries as, at the time, Facebook was still limited to academic and corporate institutions (it now has geographical networks as well).  With the permission of admin, I created a profile for my library – no bells and whistles here, just a straight, boring profile because I really wasn’t sure what would come of it.  This was merely an experiment.  But with an interesting result…  We didn’t broadcast our presence there, nor did we actively invite friends, but believe it or not, students found us.  It began with one incoming student, from the US (we’re in Nova Scotia, Canada) looking for connections before arriving in September.  Slowly, and gradually, we began to receive a steady stream of friend requests.  We were about to take this experiment and turn it into an active project when Facebook cleaned out all the institutional profiles and we lost everything.  Although our experiment failed, it did prove that students (ours anyway) embraced our presence there.  Facebook is standing firm on its policy of individual-only profiles, and has welcomed libraries to use groups to reach out to their patrons.  I know several libraries were very put out by this; some have tried creating groups and I’ve read both success stories and rants about how disappointing these groups are.  A colleague at one of our campus libraries is now creating a group and will invite students to join.  With this group, she will be able to post events such as tutorial sessions and involve students in discussions about library services.  Another interesting use of Facebook is to observe groups pertaining to the library that students have created.  It’s very interesting to read what they have to say.