Get ‘em while they’re hot, people!  The Desk and Beyond: Next Generation Services by editors Sarah Steiner and Leslie Madden!  I wrote Chapter 7, Friending our Users: Social Networking and Reference Services. You’ll also see the cutting-edge work of well known Reference Librarians from all over–it’s a title not to be missed!!!

And a big “thankyou” to Leslie & Sarah for all their hard work!

SNSes are by their very nature social- -people get on these sites to interact with other people that they know.  Right now the only services I could push out would be our catalog and databases.  Because they have no social interaction (users can’t share what they’re reading/researching), there’s no point in pushing the services into a social sphere.  As Laurie Bridges points out, the services that actually get used are the ones with a high degree of social interactivity (no matter how silly they are…I’m looking at you Pirates vs. Ninjas vs. Zombies vs. Werewolves people!).

I think it’s awesome that institutions are reaching out to their users by putting more of their services out on SNSes–this is user-centric service, to provide services where the users are.  But I would rather wait until MPOW has a next-generation catalog and interactive databases that allow users to interact with data and each other.  For now, I can spend my time on trying to get us that next-gen catalog, and interacting with students by being myself in Facebook!