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.

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.