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Tuesday, June 10, 2008

Stephens Article: Social Networking Services

I used to be one of those adults who thought social network systems like Facebook and MySpace were only used by teenagers until I found out different. I was visiting my hometown one summer and I caught up with a couple of my high school classmates. Of course I was curious to know the updates on all my other classmates that I had lost contact with over the years. Well, my two classmates that I was visiting that day recommended that I get a MySpace page. They informed me that this was the best way to reconnect with all of my high school friends. As soon as I returned to Minnesota I created a MySpace page. It amazed me how many of my high school classmates had a MySpace page. Almost instantly I was reconnected with my high school friends.
In the article, Stephens mentioned "Going where the users are", and I this is the information that I found the most vital for libraries. The new 2.0 tools that librarians choose to utilize will only be effective if it is a tool that library users are already connected to. Creating a Facebook page to communicate to a teen community only works if the teens are avid users of Facebook. The new technologies that are being presented to libraries are great and I think librarians should utilize as many new technologies as possible. However, librarians should first have a complete understanding of library users and what their needs and wants are. Knowing who and where the users are will help libraries utilize more of the technological tools that are introduced in the future.

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