Should Libraries be posting on Facebook/Myspace?

I would have to say that I believe that Libraries should be actively marketing themselves where people are. Today's society requires that you must market yourself if you want to be considered relevant. Once people stop thinking of you, you will rapidly no longer be an asset to your community. And if libraries stop becoming assets in their communities, libraries will die.

All of that being said, where and when you should find yourself on the internet is an interesting question. Primarily a library should have a website of its own. A website is the one place where a library can have total control over what it presents to the public. Through this control one may present one's self in the best light possible. You can control what users have access to, what a user sees, etc. With other sites, you are limited by whatever someone may allow you to post up. You have little control over what someone else may post about you. Libraries need to be cautious about things under which they have no control.

As to the larger question of whether a library should join MySpace or Facebook, the situation grows even slightly more complicated. I suppose you could use the scatter shot approach to marketing and allow yourself to be marketed whenever and wherever you chose. But this would spread yourself thin over too many platforms. MySpace and Facebook are barely the tip of the iceberg in social networking websites. There is bebo, Friendster, Hi5, and many many other sites with which to visit. A library could hardly be expected to keep up with all of them. But, MySpace and Facebook are among the more popular sites of the day.

My knee jerk reaction would be to say to keep yourself listed on both of them and try to keep up with both. Certainly in my time at the library the initial popular one of the two sites was MySpace. So many web pages from libraries popped up on MySpace. But in a few short years the big behemoth in social networking software is Facebook. And one would be justified in thinking that another one will pop up to overtake them both in the future. But I think to keep up with both of them would be foolhardy. What I would do is put myself on Facebook now, due to its current and seemingly burgeoning popularity. I would keep updates on that and allow users to post commentary about the place as well as keeping people updated on events that may be going on. I would then make sure there was a link from my web page to whatever social networking site was the most popular of the day. This would enable people to get a direct link from the website, which would be the most important thing as I stated earlier.

I just think that trying to keep up with everything would be a fools errand in the rapidly changing Internet. But being adaptable and learning what is most widely used and then maintaining a presence there would be a priority among any library that is going to last. Let's just hope that libraries find themselves outlasting any social networking site that may be the current "in thing."