VPL? Is that you?

The Vancouver Public Library has a pretty bunk online presence. A search on Facebook retrieves only a “VPL Facebookers” page for staff to communicate with each other. VPL has a page on Myspace, but it has not been updated since last September, which is odd in itself considering the strike. The page provides a link to the VPL website, but I’m not totally convinced the profile wasn’t started without the library’s permission. Because anyone can create a profile representing any business or organization, Myspace library pages can be questionable if they do not link directly to an official homepage that links back to them.

The same goes for the Mount Pleasant Branch profile on the VPL profile’s friend list. Perhaps “pay equity doesn’t exist here” is not an official mission statement of the branch. Just sayin’.

A Google search for the word “Myspace” on the library’s website returns three results, none of which announce the library’s presence on the social networking site. Board members for VPL are unlikely to become aware of their unofficial Myspace presence any time soon. One of the search results from Google is a transcript of some board minutes from 2006 (scroll down to #10), where Myspace is referred to as a “chat service.” Yikes.

The VPL profile and Mount Pleasant Branch profile have 114 and 229 friends, respectively. Their friends are mostly Vancouver citizens and other libraries. It’s pretty bad publicity for VPL, not only because of the statements on the Mount Pleasant Branch profile, but because of the lack of maintenance on the VPL profile. If the Vancouver Public Library had an official Myspace profile, they could provide a more credible portal from Myspace to the VPL homepage.

Or, maybe they are changing their mission statement and these pages are real. Who knows? I’m guessing VPL doesn’t.

Your fans are waiting, NYPL

The New York Public Library has a fan-created network on Ning.com, as well as a fanpage on Facebook. The Ning network only has 13 members, but the Facebook group has 104.

These are not official pages started by NYPL staff. There are no links on NYPL’s homepage to any of these websites. Bob Kosovsky, a curator for Rare Books and Manuscripts at the library, maintains a blog on the NYPL website, where he suggests that autograph albums were the original Facebook, but that’s about as close as the NYPL website gets to Facebook, officially.

Many library profiles I looked at on Facebook and Myspace were created and maintained by library fans. As is the case with the Vancouver Public Library, most of the libraries seemed to be unaware of their unofficial online presence. NYPL has over 100 fans, willing to link their profiles to the library’s, but the cost of paying a librarian to maintain the profile is perhaps beyond the benefit of 100 additional links to the library’s website.

As long as the fan pages stay friendly (not the case with VPL), there seems to be no real harm. And, hey, maybe autograph albums will take off again in some sort of grassroots New York luddite revolution. Keep reaching for those stars, NYPL!