They Wendt all over the place

Wendt Library at the University of Wisconsin is on top of it! They have profiles on Facebook, Myspace, and Friendster, and accounts on Flickr, Blogspot, and del.icio.us! All of their accounts link to each other and the library homepage. The homepage links back to some of these tools.

The Facebook link from the library’s homepage directs patrons to the Wendt Library Fanclub, a publicly accessible Facebook page. Oddly enough, this is not the same Facebook profile that the Myspace profile links to, and it does not contain a link to the other Facebook page or the Myspace profile, perhaps because these profiles are no longer kept up-to-date.

The Myspace profile is a bit dull, but it contains an interesting widget that its Myspace patrons can put on their profiles. The widget is an RSS feed of the Wendt Library Blog.

The widgets, or “applications,” used on the Facebook fanpage are much more extensive and useful. The blog’s RSS feed is included on the fanpage, as is a feed for news relating to MadCat, a Madison-only adaptation of WorldCat. WorldCat can be searched from the Facebook fanpage, through a WorldCat-developed widget that any Facebook user can add to their profile.

Also found on the fanpage is an application called “The Honesty Box,” a widget that allows anyone to submit their honest opinion to the fanpage administrator anonymously. The Wendt Library obviously knows its stuff on Facebook—this is not an explicitly library-related application, but it is useful to libraries nonetheless.

The folks at the Wendt Library have done a great job of integrating the library into popular Web 2.0 tools. They should be careful about their abandoned profiles, though—once you create a public presence on a social networking site, you need to either update or remove the profile (Web 2.0’s version of publish or perish). Otherwise, you run the risk of presenting yourself as useless and outdated, an image that library social networking sites are meant to discredit.

You I You See online

The Undergraduate Library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) is awesome. Not only do they maintain a profile on Facebook, but they even hire students to program applications for students to access the library from their own Facebook profiles! They provide a link to Undergraduate Librarian David Ward’s Facebook profile from the library website, and—even better—they provide links from their social networking profiles to the library homepage! A rarity, it seems. Patrons who are not already on Facebook can still follow Ward’s Facebook link, where they can see the listing for David Ward as well as some of his friends.

The Undergraduate Library (UGL) also has a Myspace page, but it has not been updated since April 12, 2007. UGL’s Myspace page still has 489 friends and is a great example of an attractive and useful Myspace library profile. They provide links (some of them time-ravaged, rotten links) to equipment and collection updates in the library, as well as links to local libraries. They have a catalogue search box on their page, which can be added to other Myspace users’ profiles as well. Most importantly, they have a link to their more active UGL Facebook page!

Now, perhaps you followed that last link to a generic Facebook login page. I did, too. While there did seem to be a huge migration from Myspace to Facebook in my own friend circle, I have noticed quite a few Myspace devotees. Maintaining multiple social network profiles may be too much to bear for UGL’s staff, but I think it is a bit of a mistake to focus so heavily on creating a community behind the walls of Facebook. For one, they have no publicly accessible permalink for bloggers to use! Perhaps it is this lack of visibility in blogger discourse that keeps the Facebook group at a mere 50 members.

Perhaps it is also the weirdness of linking David Ward’s personal Facebook profile from the UGL website, instead of linking this group page. But if you know Facebook (and I do), having a personal profile instead of a group page is a better marketing strategy, since updates to personal profiles generate news feeds that notify all of the profile’s “friends.” Group page updates go unnoticed unless members take the time to visit the group page.

Clearly, the folks at UIUC’s Undergraduate Library know how to get their social network on. They even have their own Facebook application! Hiring students to design and maintain applications for Facebook is a stroke of genius—their patrons are integrated into the UGL’s online existence, helping the UGL integrate into its patrons’ online lives.

Well aren’t you informative!

The San Mateo County Library has one of the best profiles on Myspace. It appears to be updated regularly, so all the information stays relevant. And there is a lot of information!

The page is less flashy than some library Myspace pages with a teen focus, and it is a bit text heavy, but it is incredibly informative. They link the Myspace page from the teen section of the SMCL website, as well as a hard-to-find features page. The Myspace profile links back to the library’s fancy homepage.

The profile also links to an incredible amount of resources that the library’s patrons might be interested in, including information on Myspace safety. I found the Myspace profile easier to navigate than the fancy homepage, and I could do just as much (if not more) on it! A lot of library profiles on Myspace kept their “Interests” section sparse, but SMCL used the Interests template to list some of the materials they offer at the library. They listed some examples of popular music, films, TV shows, and books their patrons could borrow from the library “for free!” Each Interests subheading included a link where patrons could request items to be added to the catalogue.

This Myspace profile is a great example of how libraries can use social networking templates that are familiar to younger patrons to create alternative access to the library’s official website. The SMCL Myspace profile is like a guide to the library’s website, with links organized into sections that are intuitive to patrons who are social network butterflies but who may not otherwise have the patience for fancy Flash-based websites that have to be carefully navigated.

Hennepin County Library rocks!

Hennepin County Library’s Myspace profile has 1228 friends. It has also scored the #1 friend position on the Library Myspace Study Myspace page, and it’s not hard to tell why: HCL’s Myspace page is colorful, easy to navigate, and just generally hip! The profile has music embedded into it (right now it is “Can’t Hardly Wait” by The Replacements) and the profile’s display photo is a moving gif of people posing around the library and/or with Elvis!

As well as being appropriately fashionable for Myspace-savvy patrons, HCL’s profile is downright useful! They have a search box for the Hennepin County Library catalog that can be searched from the HCL profile or from the users’ own profiles. All they have to do is cut and paste a ready-made HTML code for the search box into their profile, which most Myspace users will be familiar with. Afterall, Myspace has a layout that allows its users to customize with HTML tags. The HCL catalogue search box can be added to a profile even more easily than a profile can be “Pimped,” as the kids are saying these days.

The library not only has a page on Myspace, it also has a fanpage on Facebook, with 241 fans! The catalog search was transformed into an application on Facebook, so that users there can also add it to their profiles!

Hennepin County Library’s official homepage has links to their Myspace and Facebook pages, but they are hard to find even if you know they exist. They seem to be hidden under “TeenLinks” and then “At Your Library.” The library would probably benefit from better advertising on their main page. Myspace and Facebook users who are past their teens would probably not think to check the “Teens” section for HCL news that was relevant to them.

Overall, Hennepin County Library has done a great job of integrating itself into popular online communities. 1228 Myspace users can’t be wrong!