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 Otherwise, you run the risk of presenting yourself as useless and outdated, an image that library social networking sites are meant to discredit.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