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’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!