Thing 20 - MySpace & Facebook

55% of teens are on MySpace - that's a phenomenal statistic. At PLA there was a teen librarian talking about libraries who ban MySpace and Facebook, which is essentially saying to kids "we don't want you here in our library." What a dreadful message to the taxpayers of tomorrow: the library doesn't care about being relevant to you.

The Hennepin and Denver PL pages are interesting because they provide links to the basic library services. So I guess that's how a library should look at developing this kind of presence - as just another means of making the public (most likely the younger public!) aware of what the library has to offer. My library has not discussed whether we should be on MySpace or Facebook, but we're having a hard enough time right now keeping up with the blogs we've already begun.

 I guess I'd like to hear more about how HCL and Denver feel about their MySpace pages - do they think (or know) that they're reaching actual teens in their area, are they seeing an increase in library use, etc. It looked like lots of the "friends" listed on both pages are either authors or other libraries, and I don't know how useful that is.

The teen librarian at PLA (from a suburban library in Ohio) says she has a lot of kids contacting her on her MySpace page ...... OK, I guess it was her personal page instead of her library page. I haven't been able to find it through MySpace's search functions. But she's ended up using it to do a lot of promotion of library events.

The upshot of a lot of these tools, including MySpace and Facebook, is that they're only as useful or relevant as they are current. So time must be allocated in order to keep them updated and changing visually.