Facebook - Who's Using It?

[Connie Crosby]

Are Facebook adoption rates as high as they say? It seems to me a lot of our colleagues are using it. Who here is on Facebook. Why do you/do you not like it?

[Lyonette Louis-Jacques]

I'm on Facebook as my Second Life avatar, Montserrat Biedermann. I started to use Facebook because our reference staff here wanted to have a presence on Facebook. We can reach students where they are (see "Shifted Librarian"). They can ask us questions from there. We're there as a group (and so is our Law School) and we each have individual Facebook pages.

I sort of created the page and then left it until I got friended by another law librarian recently and boom! You are absolutely right - there are a lot of our colleagues on Facebook! :-) As far as I can tell, most of the use is personal, except for a couple of users who actually are streaming legal news and other job-related infos via Facebook. Our official Law Reference staff Facebook page has our typical information about our services and contact infos, though.

I like Facebook so far because it's fun to friend people and find out about their personal interests and such. I have to admit to SuperPokin' folks from time to time during the work day, so Facebook can be distracting...:-) But there's an opportunity for creativity there that's hard to ignore (and fun! :-)). Montserrat is....[here I try to insert something witty that my avatar is doing], just like Twitter!

What I'm leery of is the extent to which all the personal information is inter-connected. I'm still figuring it out. I friend one person and suddenly, I'm offered the option of friending whoever they friended. As I continue to friend, I get more and more friending options, and they're pretty spot on. These are people I know. So, even though I'm hiding being my avatar, the people I friend are indicating who I am in Real Life. And Facebook connects to my Google Mail and Google Talk as does the Law Librarians in Virtual Worlds wiki. So, even though I'm anonymous, the trails of my communications are there to find. It is very hard not to put personal information on Facebook.

But I'm new to paying attention to it, so I'm interested in other's take on it. I'm particularly interested in how Facebook can be used for reference and other law library services and activities. As with Second Life, can I use it to help me improve the services I provide in my special area of expertise?

[Lyonette Louis-Jacques]

P.S. And, unlike Second Life, anonymity in Facebook doesn't seem to be the default...:-) Every time I try to friend someone, I have to include a hint as to who I am in Real Life since they don't know me as Montserrat Biedermann. It's making friending people I know a verra slow process...:-)

[Vicki Szymczak]

Yep - I am on Facebook. I was dormant for a while because I adopted it and then got really busy. It wasn't part of my daily life until a few weeks ago. When i first logged in, I found the interface a bit confusing and that remains the thing I dislike about it. I am not really using it for serious stuff though. It is really about scrabble and werewolf for me; however, I recently added the WorldCat application and am going to experiment with that inside my facebook. This summer I am going to have our annual high school intern design our Library's facebook page. :) I am looking at it more as a marketing tool than anything else. I find other venues more helpful for delivering information - blogs, pods, and social tagging tools seem to be most useful for our clientele and our library.

[Sarah Glassmeyer]

I maintain a personal profile and a page for my library on Facebook.

My personal profile has been helpful on both the professional and the personal front. Professionally, I work for a large university and it's been an easy way to connect and share ideas with many of the librarians on my campus. (And, recently, some of our younger law professors.) I've also been able to network (mainly put faces to names) with other law librarians across the country. As far as students go, I generally try to respect their privacy and not look at their profiles, but some have "friended" me and used the messaging system to contact me. I keep my profile open to everyone in my network and I think it's a way of showing my students that there's more to me than someone who sits at the reference desk. I have a personality and interests, etc. A couple have started conversations with me based on something they've seen on my profile.

On a personal level, I use it to stay in contact with friends and family, none of whom live closer than a 2 hour drive. Maybe it's because of the generation I'm in or because most of my friends are librarians or because it's not like I have a secret wild life that I'm trying to hide, but I don't really mind mixing my "professional profile" with my "personal profile." I do have some friends who have their "Librarian Profile" (that's hooked to their work e-mail and network) and "Personal Profile" (that's attached to a gmail-type address), so I guess that's an option on the off chance I feel compelled to post screen shots of my "Librarians Gone Wild" videos on the Internet.

As far as the library's page, it's mainly for publicity purposes. We have a map showing where we're located, an RSS feed of our blog, and our hours/contact info. There are some applications available like Worldcat and JSTOR that are "useful", but I'm not sure anyone would ever actually use them. I've added them to the page more as advertising than thinking anyone would ever use them. I trained some summer research assistants on Monday and mentioned that there was a possibility of searching JSTOR on Facebook and was met with laughter. So I'm taking that as confirmation of my suspicion. I think if someone could create a CALI-like exercise application that would allow students to compete against each other, that might have some limited success.

There's a couple things I like about Facebook, especially in contrast to MySpace.
(1) The clean design of the site.
(2) The fact that for the most part, people use their real names (which is actually part of the terms of use) and put up pictures of themselves.
(3) The heavy use by my patron population.
(4) It's free

[Dennis Kim-Prieto]

i'm another one of these law librarians who are on facebook . . . and i joined just because i'm kind of a joiner, i suppose . . . or more accurately, a colleague from europe invited me, and i thought it would be another great way to contact and connect with him.

but in addition to connecting with colleagues and old friends that i never thought i'd see, i'm curious to see how others here will (or do) use facebook as a platform to reach out to students. like everyone else here, i'm interested in social networking, but i'm not sure that we've found a model better than the standard blog/bulletin board format.

[Connie Crosby]

It is very interesting to me how you have developed a separate identity. Did you ever come across Carla Cryptic in your web travels through the years? It reminds me of her, she had such a strong web presence under this pseudonym. Just looked up her website which I haven't visited in years: http://www.carlacryptic.com/.

Facebook is trying to distinguish itself from MySpace which has a lot of fake IDs. They are trying very hard to keep out any fake or duplicate accounts, and also trying to make people use their real names rather than pseudonyms.

We recently had a big controversy in Toronto where a screenwriter was experimenting with the web for story-telling, including having Facebook accounts for her characters. Unfortunately she presented to a group in which someone with connections to Facebook was in the audience, and the characters' profiles were shutdown pretty quickly. Here is her side of the story:
http://story2oh.com/2008/04/30/deleted-by-facebook/
and the other side of the story from the "dark-haired woman":
http://www.onedegree.ca/2008/05/facebook-keeps.html

[Lyonette Louis-Jacques]

Very interesting! Thanks for the links, Connie! Sarah's comment below led me on a search for info (I had totally missed the Terms of Use part of Facebook...:-)). I explained my use of Montserrat to Sarah off-network. But basically, having to put in my date of birth was a barrier to me using Facebook. Montserrat helped me overcome that barrier and enabled me to explore Facebook and its features that could be potentially helpful professionally. Also, Montserrat helped me get on board with the rest of the reference staff here when we decided to venture into Facebook. There are certain things Montserrat can't do at all or easily in Facebook, but it has been a worthwhile experience so far.

But it is interesting about the different cultures. The Second Life culture which makes anonymity a default. And it seems the MySpace versus Facebook cultures.
Here's what I found re Facebook when I went a lookin':

I found out there are 200 law librarians in the AALL Facebook Group. There are also Law Librarians (137 members) and Academic Law Libraries (71 members) groups there:

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2355756420

And I had somehow missed it, but Jennifer Behrens at Duke has an article on Facebook in the April 2008 AALL Spectrum:

http://www.aallnet.org/products/pub_sp0804/pub_sp0804_Facebook.pdf

Right now, I'm trying to find a way around having a thumb print to use the Bloomberg database...:-) It is otherwise quite a cool database...:-) Perhaps we can talk about general barriers to adoption of new technologies in the meebo chat room some day...:-)

[Connie Crosby]

It is interesting, the differences in culture of the various networks. I never put in my real birthday, by the way. I feel that it could be combined with other pieces of data to enable someone to steal my identity. I put in a similar birthdate and, if possible, don't display it.

[John Cannan]

I am dabbling in it to keep current. To be honest, its one of those Web 2.0 things which takes a bit too much time to keep active. That is not the case with Twitter. I have one account to communicate with librarians, one to practice my Spanish and one to practice my German.

[Connie Crosby]

I prefer Twitter, too. You don't get all those accounts confused? ;-)

[Jennifer Allison]

I'm new to the group. I'm a recent law school grad (I started law school kind of late) and now I work in the library where I went to law school. I joined Facebook when I was studying in Germany as an exchange student at a law school over there, because some American college students I was friends with there were on it and they talked me into it. I like it and look at it most days. It's a nice way to keep in touch with friends from all over and see what they're up to, without doing much work (I've gotten lazy in the information age). I also like personalizing my page with my own interests. But I don't do anything work-related with it, and don't really plan to.

[Shaunna Mireau]

I admit it - I am a Facebook user.
Why:
- to monitor clients/parties to actions where our firm is involved in litigation
- to keep up with my high school friends
- to connect with my law student and lawyer colleagues in a not-all-about-work way

Three very different, and very important (to me) things.

Biggest Facebook beef - people who don't make sure their profile is reasonable, i.e. the young lady on one side of file who had a public profile picture of herself snorting a line. I hate finding things like that, and it makes the need for me to monitor social media on our client's behalf critical.