Social networks have revolutionized personal and professional relationships. Whether it be a way to keep in touch with friends and family who live distances away or a way for companies to reach out and find a new client/market, getting and staying connected is easier than ever.
For businesses, social media can serve as a way to: create brand awareness, manage your reputation by responding to/refuting negative feedback, recruit clients and/or employees, and expand a business by learning about new technologies and competitors. Some business/professional social media sites are:
- LinkedIn - ("the professional Facebook") used to share a resume and network professionally
- Monster.com - can be used to post jobs/resumes and find jobs/employees.
- Academia.edu - can be used to share papers, monitor their impact, and follow the research in a particular field.
- Research Gate - site for scientists and researchers to share papers, ask and answer questions, and find collaborators
While social networks offer many advantages to our professional and personal lives, social media can also be a place that is dangerous. Cyberbullying and cyber stalking have begun to lead to suicides and legal issues. With this 24/7 access to friends (and foes) it makes it hard to step away from negativity, and keep our private lives private.
Libraries need to keep these things in mind when incorporating social networks into their libraries. While we might want to share information with the world, we need to be sure it is professional, and that we keep our patrons' safety, privacy, and security as the top priority.
Crowdsourcing
Crowdsourcing is a great tool to use within library MakerSpaces. This is the act of researching/solving a problem with the help of a community. Rose Holley of the National Library of Australia gives the following ways crowdsourcing can benefit libraries in her article in D-Lib Magazine:
- Achieving goals the library would never have the time, financial or staff resource to achieve on its own.
- Achieving goals in a much faster time frame than the library may be able to achieve if it worked on its own.
- Building new virtual communities and user groups.
- Actively involving and engaging the community with the library and its other users and collections.
- Utilizing the knowledge, expertise and interest of the community.
- Improving the quality of data/resource (e.g. by text, or catalog corrections), resulting in more accurate searching.
- Adding value to data (e.g. by addition of comments, tags, ratings, reviews).
- Making data discoverable in different ways for a more diverse audience (e.g. by tagging).
- Gaining first-hand insight on user desires and the answers to difficult questions by asking and then listening to the crowd.
- Demonstrating the value and relevance of the library in the community by the high level of public involvement.
- Strengthening and building trust and loyalty of the users to the library. Users do not feel taken advantage of because libraries are non-profit making.
- Encouraging a sense of public ownership and responsibility towards cultural heritage collections, through user's contributions and collaborations.
Social Network Games
As our time spend interacting virtually increases, it is only natural for the contact to evolve into online gaming. Games like Farmville and Candy Crush are popular within Facebook. These games need other people to be able to play. These games are casual, have little time commitment, low skill requirement, you can play whenever, and there are public player stats. While library purists may frown upon the use of library tech to play these social games, it could in fact be helping to teach social skills to younger kids, or help someone without this tech at home to communicate and play with friends made solely online or on these games. It only takes one person to make a difference, and that person may be on a social game for a struggling teen.
Changing Opinion of Social Networking
The more people research and delve deep into the developing world of social media, the more they begin to understand and develop their own viewpoints and theories about its use. Throughout my Social Media and Informatics course, I have been able to realize that there are far more professional social networking options than I originally thought. My initial contact with these professional sites was only via LinkedIn, but I'm beginning to see the way that business and leisure both have a place on social media.
People truly form connections via new social media sites, and this allows for introverts to express themselves within a group of like-minded peers. Reddit is by far one of my go-to places to find those passionate about the same topics (games, tv shows, etc.) and I am able to discuss with them my interests in ways I am not able to with my friends and family, who care nothing about these games or tv shows.
Also during this course, I was assigned to create an Information Service prototype with a group of my peers. With new technologies such as Skype and discussion boards, we were able to effectively communicate and create an idea for a Pinterest Board that delivered a subject guide for library patrons during the summer. Our library pinterest page is: https://www.pinterest.com/barstowlibr0035/
There were four of us in the group, and we each had a subject that we were going to flush out for summer recommendations - mine was Children's Activities/Readings for summer. I pinned a total of 50 pins ranging from booklists to crafts, which would help parents enrich their child's summer with fun and informational activities and readings. This type of collaboration could easily be implemented in any library, thus making the staff connected while being able to work separately.
Ultimately, my studies of social media have only confirmed that they do belong in the library,a nd that they are useful tools for every type of interaction. Yes, there are negatives and scary aspects of social media (trolling, hackers, identity theft, cyber bullying, cyber stalking, etc.) but, in my opinion, the good things far outweigh the bad.
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