1. Using Social Software to Reach Library Patrons Dawn Lawson New York University 8 October 2007

2. Agenda  Introduction to Facebook  Motivation  Methodology  Results

3. What Is Facebook?  An ever-expanding social networking tool originally used primarily by college students  A network of networks: registered users can search for anyone but can only see the profiles of users in their own network and in their groups, as well as those of their “friends”

4. http://www.facebook.com

5. Facebook Activities  Create a personal profile  Designate friends  E-mail  Share photos  Post updates about yourself and keep up with news feeds on your friends  Implement Facebook Apps

6. My Profile Page

7. My View (Facebook Home Page)

8. Part of My Wall

9. Project Motivation  Increase profile of the library—many students are unaware that there is a subject specialist in their discipline  Exemplify the “Go where the user is” approach  May be the most efficient way to find majors

10. Methodology  Search for NYU East Asian Studies majors  E-mail them about the library  Stay tuned as the messages, friending requests, and reference questions come in

11. Results  Contacted 140 students: 46 seniors, 44 juniors, 34 sophomores, 16 first- year students  Received 24 replies in Facebook (17%), 8 requests to become a “friend,” and 5 specific reference questions

12. Graphical Display of Results

13. Glitches  Facebook’s spam detector is getting stronger every day  They threatened to ban me!  I varied the message and slowed down—c o n s i d e r a b l y

14. Future Plans  Create a “group” for programming purposes  Redo the outreach every fall or every semester  Keep my own Facebook activities dynamic

15. Next Month: Book Publication  My complete case study will appear as a chapter in Library 2.0 Initiatives in Academic Libraries, edited by Laura B. Cohen, forthcoming from ACRL (Association of College and Research Libraries).  For the next two years, I and the other authors of chapters in that book will be updating their work on a wiki. In addition, I will be publishing my chapter on the Internet. See http://homepages.nyu.edu/~dl80 for details.http://homepages.nyu.edu/~dl80

16. If Additional Questions Arise  Feel free to get in touch with me by e-mail at dawn.lawson@nyu.edu or through Facebookdawn.lawson@nyu.edu THANK YOU!