Using Social Software to Reach Library Patrons Dawn Lawson New York University 8 October 2007

Agenda  Introduction to Facebook  Motivation  Methodology  Results

What Is Facebook?  An ever-expanding social networking tool originally used primarily by college students  A network of networks: registered users can search for anyone but can only see the profiles of users in their own network and in their groups, as well as those of their “friends”

Facebook Activities  Create a personal profile  Designate friends   Share photos  Post updates about yourself and keep up with news feeds on your friends  Implement Facebook Apps

My Profile Page

My View (Facebook Home Page)

Part of My Wall

Project Motivation  Increase profile of the library—many students are unaware that there is a subject specialist in their discipline  Exemplify the “Go where the user is” approach  May be the most efficient way to find majors

Methodology  Search for NYU East Asian Studies majors  them about the library  Stay tuned as the messages, friending requests, and reference questions come in

Results  Contacted 140 students: 46 seniors, 44 juniors, 34 sophomores, 16 first- year students  Received 24 replies in Facebook (17%), 8 requests to become a “friend,” and 5 specific reference questions

Graphical Display of Results

Glitches  Facebook’s spam detector is getting stronger every day  They threatened to ban me!  I varied the message and slowed down—c o n s i d e r a b l y

Future Plans  Create a “group” for programming purposes  Redo the outreach every fall or every semester  Keep my own Facebook activities dynamic

Next Month: Book Publication  My complete case study will appear as a chapter in Library 2.0 Initiatives in Academic Libraries, edited by Laura B. Cohen, forthcoming from ACRL (Association of College and Research Libraries).  For the next two years, I and the other authors of chapters in that book will be updating their work on a wiki. In addition, I will be publishing my chapter on the Internet. See for details.

If Additional Questions Arise  Feel free to get in touch with me by at or through THANK YOU!