Category: Social Networking Sites

Online Photo Sharing Services

This week I played around with photo sharing services. I already had accounts with Flickr and Photobucket; and since I had used Photobucket most recently to share pictures I had taken at the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays, I decided to use those to upload to my Facebook account. This was a piece of cake. Uploading to this blog was a little trickier because I wanted to upload an avatar I had created to the sidebar area–not to a blog post or separate photo section of my blog. I read the help FAQs and figured out how to upload the avatar but had trouble with the alignment. I finally centered it but I’m not all that satisfied with it. But it’ll do for now.

Having photo albums online to share is a great marketing tool for libraries. In fact, a lot of libraries have photos on Flickr. It’s a wonderful way to present your library staff to current users or introduce them to potential users. The public library where I work as a part-time substitute placed a link to its Flickr account on the home page and explained that different library staff would be profiled regularly. It’s fun to get to know the people working at the library. Plus it’s a good way to show folks what the library is up to. Why not put up photos of library programs and events? It’s a very inexpensive way to market services. A friend of mine put up pictures of her library on her Facebook page. Very cool! And at one library where I worked, Facebook is a very popular site among the residents. I wonder how they would react to seeing their hospital librarians on Facebook!!

Social Networking Sites

This past week I played with social networking sites (Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn). I must say, I didn’t think that I would enjoy this as much as I did. It was a lot of fun; and I even connected with friends and colleagues that I didn’t even know were using these sites!I absolutely love the library sites I visited on MySpace. If I were a teen in Denver, I would think I had the coolest public library around. Plus, I was really impressed by the number of teens who interacted with the site. The Brooklyn College Library  site is cool as well.Having previously worked in a hospital library, I know that the residents use Facebook and MySpace a lot when they’re on a break.  I know that there are some worries about privacy, but IT does doesn’t block those sites in the medical library. However, they are blocked in the community library (patients and visitors use this library). The medical library there has no plans to use these sites as far as I know.Where I am now, the library uses an internal wiki and has an application on Facebook that members can “subscribe” to  search their database without having to leave Facebook. They really have been exploring ways to reach their users, which is great. I also like the way my professional association (Medical Library Association) has used Facebook for its annual meeting. Although I can’t go, I really liked being able to see who was going. Some people who responded also had their pictures, so I could actually put a face to names I’ve been seeing for a long time. I really liked it as a networking tool.I didn’t do much with LinkedIn. I think because I had spent so much time on Facebook and MySpace, I just got a little tired! I signed up but haven’t done much else. Overall, I’d say that it was great playing with these sites. I’m still using MySpace (I already had an account) and Facebook (I just created a photo album).