Friendface ...

Next 'thing' on the agenda: our old friend facebook. Judging by the increase in views from our recent user statistics on the Jerwood Library fan page, more and more librarians discover how useful facebook can be for libraries. Be it updating readers on anything library related, entertaining readers with library activities or just making life easier by providing very useful widgets (I do recommend the lib@cam widget). Some facebook tools are more useful than others. For example, we have begun to slowly phase out use of our Jerwood Library group and changed to a fan page. This is much easier to maintain and makes sure our updates reach our readers (unless they don't want to).

I especially like how libraries and readers seem to get closer on a much more personal level by posting comments or 'liking' things. For readers, this changes the perception of libraries and librarians are regarded as a lot more approachable than ever before. And as much as I always like to complain about facebook, this is rather a positive aspect.

In case you have 30 mins, would love some quality distraction and at the same time, would like to learn about possible side-effects of facebook, I recommend watching this:
http://www.channel4.com/programmes/the-it-crowd/4od#2919508