Networking
Librarians and researchers network online
It is still early days for librarians networking with users online, but there are plenty of potential benefits if librarians and their organisations get it right, writes David Stuart
The library and information science community have been quick to recognise the potential of social network sites to engage with both customers and other library and information professionals. Sites such as Twitter and Facebook, which allow users to build profiles, publicly connect with other users, and share content, are currently some of the biggest online properties. Whenever a new social network site appears, librarians are often amongst the first to be found putting it through its paces, testing its suitability for their community of users. Books and articles abound on how libraries and information services can, and are, making use of such social network sites to share their content and have conversations with their users. However, if you delve below the surface,
you quickly discover a far more complex information landscape. There are vast differences in the extent to which libraries are making use of the social network site opportunities, from the academic libraries that have been quick to embrace the potential of social network sites, to the corporate sector, which has been more circumspect. What’s more, just because a library takes the lead, it does not mean that its users will follow.
Academic libraries Academic libraries are ideally placed amongst the library community to take advantage of the opportunities offered by the latest web technologies. The annual
12 Research Information August/September 2010
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influx of new students provides the academic librarian with a large number of users for whom traditional communication channels within the institution have not already become entrenched, and who are already regularly using social network sites in their personal lives. In addition, the importance of openness to the innovation process has been recognised and encouraged within the academic community for a long time. There
are also signs of increasing openness through open access and open data. The public embracing of social media by academic libraries is clearly visible. Visit any academic library’s web pages today and you are likely to find a number of links to social network sites alongside the more traditional opening times and online catalogue. Where there are no links to social network sites to be found it is as likely to be a reflection of the rigmarole of dealing with the institution’s content management system as the non- adoption of any social network sites. Generally, however, these links are to the
official organisational presence, which all too often fails to engage the conversational potential of the technologies. Gareth Johnson, document supply and research archive manager at the University of Leicester, UK, described his university library’s repository and news page Twitter feeds as ‘more of a web 1.0 broadcast approach and less of an interactive one.’ The web 1.0 attitude is also carried
over into his library’s Facebook groups, which, despite being used considerably to interact with the library’s users, fail to offer a truly open conversational forum. ‘As an organisation, the ethos in using these sites is more directed at controlling the
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