As of this morning, UNC is back in session for the spring term – how the winter break flies! This semester I’ll be teaching my Online Social Networks course. This is the third time I’ve taught this particular course, and it is a lot of fun. I’m in the midst of updating the syllabus, which I’ll post to the blog when I finish.
Of potential interest to my readers is an article I discovered in the most recent issue of Portal.
Academic Libraries, Facebook and MySpace, and Student Outreach: A Survey of Student Opinion.
This study surveyed 366 Valparaiso University freshmen to discover their feelings about librarians using Facebook and MySpace as outreach tools. The vast majority of respondents had online social network profiles. Most indicated that they would be accepting of library contact through those Web sites, but a sizable minority reacted negatively to the concept. Because of the potential to infringe on students’ sense of personal privacy, it is recommended that librarians proceed with caution when implementing online social network profiles.
I’ve only skimmed this article, but I am collecting resources on social networks and libraries for one of our classes this semester. There is a growing body of literature on libraries and social networks – if you know something noteworthy feel free to leave a comment.
I would be remiss without congratulating Lori Eakin and Jeff Pomerantz, colleagues at SILS, for their study Virtual Reference, Real Money: Modeling Costs in Virtual Reference Services which appears in the same edition of Portal.
Fred Stutzman is a doctoral student, researcher and teaching fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's School of Information and Library Science. He studies how people use social media.
