3 March 2010
Facebook frenzy
The number of times we find our SOLO machines displaying Facebook should be reason enough for our library to create a presence on the ubiquitous social net-working site. We have in fact created a dummy site, but are waiting for the powers that be to give their approval before going live.
When we started thinking about a library Facebook presence we kept stumbling upon questions which were tricky to answer. For example, we didin't know whether we needed to worry about people not related to the college becoming fans of our page for security reasons. When we looked at other college library Facebook pages, there seemed to be large numbers of fans who appeared to have no connection with the college. Does anyone else worry about that?
We decided early on that we wanted to keep our Facebook presence quite focused on library information, not becoming too embroiled in the more social aspects of the site. So, we included our address, a reminder of the opening hours over Easter and when books are due back, some links to other college-related Facebook pages, and a link to SOLO. We'd also like to have links to our own web catalogue, but there are some technical problems with that at the moment.
With more time on our hands, we'd create a number of groups in order to target information to specific subjects about new books and lists of Delicious bookmarks. Does anyone have an idea of how many hours in a week this might take us? Our fellow librarian is wondering if the time needed to keep Facebook up-to-date is going to be equivalent to the increase in student awareness.
Photo by Scott Beale / Laughing Squid.
2 comments:
I think as with everything it's difficult to say how much time maintaining a Facebook presence will take. It really depends on how much time you want to invest! The page I maintain for the VHL takes me almost no time at all, as I have set it up so that our news publishes there automatically, and that's the main purpose we use it for. Everything else - the basic information etc - was all just time at the point of setting it up and now can just be left unless there's a change to make.
I think the trick with web 2.0 is to take advantage of the automated linking things so that you can update lots of sites all at once. So if you already have a newsfeed, just set it to publish to facebook too, or you could do it the other way around - write your news as notes within facebook and take the feed from there to publish automatically on your website.
Good luck with it!
Thanks Jane. It's good to hear from someone with experience of these things. The automatic updates seem the way to go, so I'll look into that, thanks!
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