Survey results shows majority will not use library services in Facebook

I received this survey results from Gerry McKiernan who has been updating us with interesting library developments on Facebook, and I'd like to highlight it here as well, since many of us have also been thinking about how to get our library's presence into Facebook.

Gerry McKiernan highlighted this particular statement from the survey results:

"A total of 23% of respondents stated that ‘yes’ or ‘maybe’ they would be interested in contacting a librarian via these two social networking sites. Undergrads had a slightly higher than average percentage of 34%. Nearly half of the total respondents stated they would not be interested, but for various reasons - the biggest reason being that they feel the current methods (in-person, email, IM) are more than sufficient. 14% said no because they felt it was inappropriate or that Facebook/MySpace is a social tool, not a research tool."

Librarians have always been in the forefront of using technology to reach out to their users and promote their services. In the olden days of telephone, there's telephone reference enquiry. Then when the internet becomes popular, you can email your librarian, or use chat/IM to talk to them. When mobile messaging (SMS) becomes the norm in communication, we also made it possible for you to SMS your enquiry to us. And then people start to think that they need a Second Life in cyberspace, and librarians are quick to create virtual libraries or Second Life libraries. Now the craze is social networking sites such as Facebook and My Space. Some brave librarians have created some presence there, but perhaps apart from some institutional/university libraries who have targetted networks in Facebook, public and national libraries do not seem to have much success in reaching out to users there. The main problem is the lack of targetted networks unlike institutional libraries where they could probably reach their users based on the institutional networks set up in Facebook already.

We try to keep up with technology, but in reality, we grapple with manpower shortages and budget constraints like many other libraries in the world. We'd like to have our library's presence in every space that our user is spending their time in, we'd like to park ourselves in each user's desktop if possible, but sometimes, the quest to be everywhere all at once does result in us spreading ourselves thin. So sometimes, it's good to take a step back and ask ourselves do users even want us to be in Facebook in the first place. I don't have an answer at the moment, and I'm not against having library presence in Facebook. But every presence that we create requires manpower to handle the additional enquiries that come in through the new channel, and hiring additional help costs money. So, I suppose sometimes in reality, we just have to make a choice on maximising staff strength on things that really creates value for our users.