Reference Renaissance: "Okay This is Just Too Weird"

"Okay This is Just Too Weird": Identifying Outreach Opportunities in Facebook by David Bietila and Elizabeth Edwards of George Washington University (GWU) was the third session that I attended at the 2008 Reference Renaissance.

This was a fun session to be in. And as someone who dabbles in social networking sites both personally and professionally, quite interesting. The session had a definite effect on my planned future friending behavior.

David and Elizabeth switched repeatedly during the presentation, so I'm not going to separate out their contributions like I've done with other speakers.

They did a study with the help of an anthropology student shortly after the GWU libraries had just completed a "friend a librarian" publicity campaign. About half of GWU librarians had Facebook profiles and students were aware that librarians were avaiable to be friended. But no students had friended any of the GWU librarians by the end of the publicity campaign. This study looked for the reasons for this result, among other purposes.

The study consisted of a survey, plus some ethnographic observations and interviews. Librarian profiles were also studied. While presenting survey results, David and Elizabeth compared their findings to a literature review they did. I omitted the references to the Facebook literature because 1) I trust you're keeping up with it and 2) this will be included in the proceedings and I'm not a transcript service.

How GWU students used Facebook

David and Elizabeth reported:

• Majority of GWU students use Facebook more than once a day.
• Strong majority of students use Facebook to maintain existing relationships. That is, they "friend" people they've met in real life and don't mine Facebook for new "friends."
• Students use Facebook for academic purposes including - communicating about assignments (68%); arrange study groups (61%); and communicate about academic interests (47%).

Despite using Facebook for academic purposes, most students also use Facebook for "study breaks" and self-report that Facebook negatively affects their studies.

For contacting the library, students prefer to e-mail or IM to using Facebook. In response to a question from me, Elizabeth thought this result might change now that Facebook has integrated chat.

What GWU Students Think About Librarians on Facebook

According to surveys and interview data:

• 32% of students said they were NOT interested in seeing librarian profiles.
• 60% of students wanted to see study suggestions on librarian FB profiles
• 55.7% of students were interested in tips on accessing library resources
• 26% of students were interested in personal information about librarians at their school

In general, students felt varying degrees of discomfort about librarians friending them without being asked. In interviews, none of the students cared for the ideas. But they were ok with the concept of adding librarians as Facebook friends IF there was some sort of face-to-face or IM/e-mail encounter first.

There is more to the study than is in my notes. Be sure to check the conference site (see below) for presentation slides when they come out. There were some interesting comparisons between librarians, parents and faculties in terms of how much students want to see them on Facebook.

David and Elizabeth concluded by saying that their library still saw value in having a Facebook presence for the library. Based on the student study, they offered some recommendations, which they cautioned should be taken with a grain of salt:

1. Create a fan page for the library for patrons to link to. This seems more comfortable to students than directly friending librarians. They offered the Gelman Library fan page as an example. A stroll through their 87 fans shows some current GWU students and several alumni, so this approach seems to workfor them.
2. In librarian profiles, keep a personal/professional balance. No personal is viewed as too cold, too much personal is seen as odd. It's important to include a picture and the librarian's subject expertise. Having one of Facebook's book recommendation applications is a good idea since it ties into the traditional library brand.
3. Let others friend you. Try to make connections in RL to encourage students/patrons to friend you.
4. Put a few, library-related applications onto your fan page. Gelman offers a meebo chat ref app and an Open WorldCat search.

Elizabeth and David said the grain of salt was necessary because your patron base might be different and these recommendations might get out of date in the next year or two as Facebook and other social networking sites change.

In the course of building their Facebook fan page, they found a few preexisting groups for the Gelman Library. These proved useful recruiting grounds for their study, but surprised them. I looked for my library, but found no groups or fan pages. How about you?

What I took home from this presentation was 1) I will not friend my patrons unless I've had some prior interaction with them and even then will probably wait for them to friend me; 2) might seek permission to create a library fan page before someone beats us to the punch; and 3) update my govdocs related groups and fan pages in the next few weeks.

=========================

Note: By August 20, 2008, all of the presentation slides and handouts for Reference Renaissance will posted to the conference site at http://www.bcr.org/referencerenaissance/index.html. Later in the year, Neal-Schuman will be publishing conference proceedings. I’m looking forward to those, since I (or anyone else) could only attend 1/6 of the offered sessions, plus the Keynote and the Plenary Session.

Also, as I write up sessions, I very much welcome comments and corrections. Just as I was physically unable to attend all 36 sessions, so too I might not have picked up on everything in the sessions I did attend or I might have accidentally misinterpreted something. Or maybe you’ve got a different take on the session you’d like to share.