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 Otherwise, you run the risk of presenting yourself as useless and outdated, an image that library social networking sites are meant to discredit.

Apply an application

One of the great things about Facebook (also the most annoying) is that you can add applications (widgets) that allow you to furnish your profile as you see fit. Applications are not developed by Facebook but by regular people who have too much time on their hands.

Some librarians are taking advantage of their spare time (what spare time?) to create applications for their patrons on Facebook. Hennepin County Library Catalog, Warwick U Library, and UIUC Library Search are only three examples of applications that allow users to search their library’s catalogues directly from their own Facebook profiles.

Other librarians are developing broader applications that many libraries can participate in. For instance, the AskAway application can be added to any Facebook profile so that anyone can use AskAway’s services from the Facebook interface.

Application developers are starting to borrow each other’s designs. There is even a group for creating applications that connect Facebook users with their libraries, with over 2500 members. Libraries like Hennepin County Library and the others listed above are ahead of the game.

A list of good library-related Facebook applications can be found here.

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!