libraria miscellanea

When will the madness end? Now the myspace buzz is out, facebook is in. I even saw a mashup [can't find it again!] that proclaimed facebook the genius brainchild of social networking systems, and myspace the red-headed step-child who scrubs the floors. Okay, maybe it wasn't really that bad, but it was pretty brutal. And I'm supposed to give a conference presentation about how helpful myspace can be for libraries? I'm going to have to dig pretty hard for that one. Yikes!

It seems that our MySpace page is becoming a success! Just the other day, I got an actual instant message from someone asking about our teen programming. Hurray! We started out getting a few friend requests per week, but now we are almost up to 100! Some of these are book authors, or musicians, folks soliciting business, but mostly they are real people. Using social networking sites, like Facebook and MySpace, have been really helpful means of getting information. For example, Stillwater Public Library is friends with local businesses, like Vault Video, a video store that is owned by a Stillwater community member and specializes in older titles. They post bulletins about upcoming sales and specials, which can then be passed on to other friends, and they pass it on, you get the idea. So, the passing of ideas on MySpace is a lot like word of mouth, which seems to be the way more and more people are getting information. At least that I have observed.

I created a generic myspace page for a public library as my final project in Doc Martens' LIS web class in Fall 2006. I also work as a reference librarian at a public library. My fellow librarian and comrade liked it, and thought he would show it to our library director, who also liked it, and asked me to tailor it to our library, Stillwater Public. I no longer have the beta-version available, but here is what the "finished" product looks like. Luckily for our library, we do not receive e-rate funding, so we do not have to block social networking and blogging websites, like other schools and libraries do. Patrons come to our library to access the internet and www.myspace.com, more specifically, because it's banned in so many places. I put up signs last week advertising that our library is now on myspace, and got a few extra friends requests. Hopefully, as word spreads, more people will be interested in joining our friends' list and getting all sorts of up