I’ve been administering the Facebook Page for University of Wolverhampton Learning Centres for just over a year now.

It’s been a great learning process for me – not only the actual process of creating and developing the Facebook Page but also managing my first project with all the associated paperwork and processes involved.

Over the course of the year, many librarians have been in touch asking for advice about whether or not to create a Facebook Page for their library; many have gone on to do so, others are still unsure. My personal recommendation is to give it a go if users are already using Facebook – it’s a minimal investment (I’ve spent around 16 hours in total including the initial setup and project administration), and could be one way of reaching some of the users you currently don’t reach by traditional means.

If you’re interested in finding out more about the project, I recently wrote an article about our experiences which has been published in the latest edition of ALISS Quarterly:

Alcock, J. (2009) Using Facebook Pages to reach users: the experiences of University of Wolverhampton. ALISS Quarterly, 4(2), pp.2-6.

Katharine Widdows from University of Warwick also wrote an article about their experiences with Facebook Pages in the same issue so you may want to get hold of a copy to read both our points of view.

Please feel free to e-mail me if you would like any more information about the Facebook Page itself or the overall project, I’ll be happy to help if I can.

As an aside, I’m currently having issues with RSS feeds on the Page, I was previously using the Blog RSS Feed Reader application which suited our needs and looked great, but seemed to stop updating a few months ago. I then moved to RSS-Connect and now frequently get the message “Feed Unavailable” despite the fact that if I open the feed link in another window it is fine. Does anyone have any recommendations for reliable RSS feed display applications for Facebook Pages?