I have two reasons to make this post today:

• This morning I got the go ahead for my “Using Facebook Pages to reach our users” project at work
• The LASSIE project is coming to an end and the reports are available online

I’m really quite proud that my Facebook project is finally properly underway. Now that the Project Proposal has been OK’d with management I can really start progressing it. I have a meeting with my Project Sponsor on Monday morning when we can hopefully plan the way forward. The page is currently live (please feel free to have a look and let me know what you think, all feedback greatly received!) but has not yet been advertised. I’m hoping to improve the page, add new features, and encourage more of our users to join as fans so that we can send them updates about our services and events. I’m not expecting massive numbers of fans but if we can make contact with some students we previously wouldn’t have then I’ll be very happy.

Bizarrely, today was also the day that Jane Secker released the last case study (titled libraries and Facebook!) from the LASSIE project on libraries and social software. I read the early project documentation last year so am looking forward to reading the experiences of their case studies. I’m particularly interested in their reading list case study (as well as the Facebook one obviously!) as I would really like to see our reading lists managed more efficiently and am sure wikis or web services are one of the possible ways we could achieve this. I have 6 hours on the train tomorrow so I’ve printed them all out and am saving them for the train journey!

I’ve got a couple of interesting conferences coming up (one in Southampton tomorrow hence the long train journey!) which include discussions about social software so I’m hoping to share good practice and talk through ideas with other library colleagues there.

Firstly, a brief apology for the extended time period since the last post, I’ve been mega busy with work, study and preparing for Christmas (as well as spending a week in Scotland which was more of the relaxing than busy variety!). If you’re interested, I’ll be adding photos of our Scotland visit and a trip to London yesterday to my Flickr and Facebook accounts shortly.

Anyway, back to the purpose of this post. Since I first started investigating how we could utilise Facebook for our library users it’s had it’s fair share of issues and hoops to jump through, but it looks likely that we’ll be able to start using it soon. Our University Marketing department now have a corporate account on Facebook and they’ll hopefully be able to set a page up for our department to use as part of their account.

I’ve also been trying to establish exactly what we should use it for. My view is that it should be used as a marketing tool. I know that many of our students use Facebook on a regular basis, and I’m hoping we can promote our Facebook page to them so that they will join as fans. This way we can send them news updates (e.g. Christmas opening hours) and notify them of any events they may be interested in (e.g. our information skills workshops). I hope we can add links to useful sections of the library web pages which we all know are not used effectively at the moment by students (usually because they’re not aware of the material on there), and maybe even add a catalogue search box integrated in Facebook.

There are a few UK academic libraries appearing on Facebook Pages so I’m hoping we’ll be able to share advice and experiences, there is a group within Facebook called Libraries using Facebook Pages which I’ve found very useful to see what others are up to.

Is anyone else out there using Facebook Pages (for libraries or other organisations)?

Facebook have finally created a section for organisations to create a page – woohoo!

Groups have been possible on Facebook for quite a while, but from my experience these are not well used. You have to actively visit the page to see any updates, and in today’s age of RSS feeds and e-mail subscriptions this means that people very easily forget about them – I know I do!

Facebook Pages now allow organisations to create a page on Facebook and customise it (pretty much like an individual profile but you can have numerous administrators). People can then add themselves as “Fans” and you can send updates to all your fans at once.

I’ve expressed an interest in creating a page for our library department here but it now has to go through all the formalities of a project proposal, a sponsor, etc, etc. so it could take a while. It’s a shame really as I wanted to just have a go and see how it panned out, but I thought it best to check with people higher just in case.

I still think it is another excellent way to keep students up to date though and could be a great way to publicise events such as our workshops which anyone can turn up to. Just a quick wander through our IT Suite tells you that Facebook is very heavily used by a lot of our students, and I think we really need to be going to our users wherever they are, rather than waiting for them to come to us.

I’m hoping to take the project forward as I really think it could be a good way to reach students, I just hope we can pass it through the formalities fairly quickly as the actual page construction will only take a few minutes!

Has anyone else developed a new Facebook Page for their organisation?