It seems like everyone today is talking about social media. It seems like you can’t go 2 seconds listening to the radio without hearing about some new Tweet a star has made, someone’s Facebook page, or a blog that has great information on it. Social media, apparently, is here to stay! As a librarian, it’s necessary for me to keep up with the latest technological advances, since it will happen with or without me. If your library’s patron base has anything to do with young people, it is especially important to keep up, since the younger audience is more “plugged in” than any generation before!
YALSA (Young Adult Library Services Association) recently updated their Social Networking Toolkit, and it contains a lot of good information for libraries. Among other things, the Toolkit helps familiarize readers with the Web 2.0 terms, social media outlets, and provides tools to help libraries in getting started using social networking. According to the Toolkit, social networking technologies “…are an ideal environment for teens to share what they are learning or to build something together online.”
It seems to me that the most useful social networking tool would probably be the blog. Blogs can be used in a number of different ways, and the benefit is huge! For example, a school library could use a blog to keep students, faculty, and administration up-to-date on library events, new materials, and much more. It’s so easy to update a blog that it would take a very small amount of time for the librarian to dedicate, and could even save him/her some time by providing answers to questions that are frequently asked. However, I have to say that there is nothing sadder than a neglected blog. I’ve visited the El Cajon library web site for information while working on the flyers, and found their Teen Scene was woefully out of date, with the last update on February 2! Another slacker, the teen blog for the Columbus Metropolitan Library hadn’t been updated since last September. Even the teen area of the New York Public Library is not immune, with the header at the top still referring to 2009. You’ve got to dedicate the time to this people, or you just look lame!
The other useful social networking tool is probably Facebook or MySpace. My teenage daughter’s friends are all on Facebook, and they are “fans” of a lot of odd things. It seems like I get an update every few minutes on something new one of them has decided to follow (yes, I’m “friended” by my daughter’s friends!). So if they can be fans of “Join if you have a name that is always spelt wrong!” why not the library? All it would take is a post or 2 a day about something evenly mildly interesting to a teen, and they’d be hooked! Then you just have to maintain it and you’ve got a whole new inroad into teen patrons. Instant gratification for everyone!
For more information on this fascinating topic, here are a couple of links to great resources for librarians looking to jump on the social networking bandwagon:
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This is a very interesting post as our library (Columbus Metropolitan Library) has fully embraced social media and is actively involved on Twitter and Facebook. We also launched two new blogs including Great Reads and All History is Local. (http://www.columbuslibrary.org/blog/recent-posts)
ReplyDeleteWe also wanted to clarify one of your comments on our Teen blog. We moved our Teen blog out of Google's blogger, but at the time the decision was made to keep the blogger for the old archive of posts. We think you might have pulled from that and we thank you for bringing this to our attention as it's something we should reconsider. Here is the actual Teen blog which is frequently updated. http://teens.columbuslibrary.org/
Thank you,
Julie Theado
for Columbus Metropolitan Library
Very interesting comments about keeping up your blog. Some libraries assign their younger employees, who may enjoy this type of media, to keep their blog current.
ReplyDeleteShawndy:
ReplyDeleteI look at both of the links and they are wonderful!
M K
Thanks for the update, Julie. I did go check out your current teen site, and my teenage daughter agrees that it's everything a young adult could want in a site. She even expressed a desire to forward your link to our local library so they could "see how it's supposed to be done!" Great job on the site!
ReplyDeleteShawndy
Swandy: I was exploring the 25 useful social networking tools and whoa! I have to keep on learning, every time I think I am ahead of the game there is something new... thanks for sharing! I am going to try the Meebo and the second life
ReplyDeleteM