more about social networking

I was very impressed with the museums and their presentations of their collections and services. The Boston Museum of Contemporary Art is excellent and I really like the fact that people are encouraged to upload their photos of the museum and exhibits to flickr and share them with everyone. It truly makes the people feel that the museum belongs to all of them.There was so much information on some of the sites it is hard to know where to begin. There were Friends of libraries donations guidelines, codes of practice, advertising of services by libraries like Renfrewshire and so much more. Every site had many ideas that could be adapted by other libraries whatever their size. The British library was on Facebook but I was more impressed with Rotorua Library which used Bebo.
The Coshocton Public Library has a very specific club for animanga and I imagine that this use really appeals to young people. Not only do they target a specific group of customers but they use a medium that is particularly appealing to younger people to contact them and advertise activities etc. They offer information about meeting times and times for such things as drawing workshops etc.
Libraries (no matter how small) could use social networking to reach a much larger group of clients, in particular young, computer savvy customers. In our small library group (main & 2 branches) there are large numbers of people that are not being reached by what we are currently offering and it would be good to expand our advertising of services etc to explore whether that would increase patronage. There are author interviews available, book reviews, ideas for games and contests, and it would be an ideal way to keep up with trends in other libraries. A more modern approach hopefully would interest younger users and help them get past the idea that libraries are just for reading books or doing homework. On the other hand lots of older people are not even aware that libraries offer more than books and are missing out on opportunities to learn to use technology in a meaningful way. The occasional introductory computer class could be expanded to cover such things as social networking, blogs, flickr, youtube, online applications, podcasts etc. I had no real idea of the vast resources available and have enjoyed challenging myself to go beyond the boundaries of the way I normally use computers. I feel that I would like to offer small classes at the branch I work at to cover individual topics like flickr etc. Time constraints are always a problem in a one staff member branch but small windows of opportunity exist and have to be made use of more efficiently in order to reach more people.