Project Play 2nd sem. Week 5

I got to skip week 4 - how nice. :) Catch-up time is always nice. You can't go wrong there. This week's topic was social networking. I went and visited La Crosse PL, Oshkosh PL OurSpace, West Bend PL , Winnefox Library System MySpace pages. I liked how Oshkosh added a picture of one of their lions. It is very cute - how they guard over the library. I think I had the most fun skimming through all of the friends of the libraries. I couldn't believe how many West Bend has! It was sort of nice to see how many authors wanted to be friends of libraries. I also liked the video clip on La Crosses site. Granted it was old, but you can tell the teens put it all together. It gave them a voice. The only thing I found difficult were the backgrounds. It's hard to figure out what they all are, when boxes cover it all. The wonderful book tree background in West Bend's page is nice, but it took a while to load and text is hard to read over the top of it all. I liked the simplicity of the Winnefox's and Oshkosh's backgrounds.

I think libraries have a place in social networking. It is just another way to let the public know that we are out there as a great resource and we want to help. This is a great way to reach tech savvy users. We need to go to and create places where people are going. However, I admit, they still need to maintain a professional attitude and look. Who is going to take a library and their account seriously if they just had a bunch of unrelated messages and pictures on their site that have nothing to do with the library. It needs to be done tastefully or we can give people a negative viewpoint about the library. I like how links to the catalog and other resources appeared on the pages. Then all you have to do it click to get to where you want to go - it's a lot simpler than trying to search for it.

I think it would be great to have a MySpace and/or Facebook page for the library. What a great way to reach out to users who would normally think the library has nothing to offer them. Yet, it also means someone needs to be responsible for the page. Things should get updated on a regular basis - so it looks like someone is checking and taking care of the page. We would also need to think about who we are trying to target and who is putting the page together. Not all of our patrons are going to be using the web and finding content that way. Young children aren't generally going to be looking for us on the computer, but their parents probablly are. :) nees