These sites allow users to create profiles that maintain a record of personal information submitted by the user. This profile can contain things like the user's favorite music, birthday, contact information, and favorite hangouts. This information is shared with other users to facilitate networking and to generate traffic for the site. Traffic represents people using the site, which is the key to making them attractive to their ultimate customer, advertisers. Whatever the values of the individuals running the site, this creates pressure to encourage users to share private information as freely as possible. This allows them to attract additional users, as well as to provide data for targeted advertisements.
This description serves as a healthy reminder for overly enthusiastic librarians that these sites are "controlled by third parties [and] they represent a space whose owners create the parameters for what is possible" [emphasis mine]. As such, librarians "cannot exert direct control over the social networking sites they interact with" ... As a profession, we cannot place ourselves within an SNS environment like Facebook or Twitter and expect to exert influence/maintain control over our patrons' information; in effect, librarians are entering someone else's "yard" and have to play by "their" rules (whether they like it or not).
Of course, this doesn't stop librarians from "working to integrate social networking sites into their outreach efforts by creating profiles that allow them to interact with their patrons in this new space"; in fact, some libraries take it a step further and try to adapt some of their "rules" into the social experience by "integrating services such as catalog searching directly into their social networking sites" ... A lot of articles I've read point out features such as this (and I must admit that building one's individual OPAC into a Facebook page does sound cool on the surface), but I am curious if librarians who've attempted this have made public any actual usage statistics; being able to search the catalog directly through a social networking site seems rather impressive, but do patrons actually use this feature? If not, and they're ignoring this feature, then it suddenly seems a lot less impressive, as it's serving no real purpose for the library's outreach efforts (other than trying to make the library look "cool").
In the end, the author warns that "future updates to [social networking sites] could potentially track how people use library profiles; collect information about how their users access the library catalogue; or perhaps most worryingly, do something else entirely that librarians cannot anticipate" ... Librarians need to be aware of these types of scenarios when putting their "trust" into a third-party for-profit business like Facebook or Twitter. After all, once a library encourages their patrons to join a social networking site, they are basically "handing over" that information for unknown purposes ("Once a user's information has been placed into the system, there is no way to retain full control over how it is used").
I think this statement by the author highlights the concerns we as librarians must have when using social-networking sites, rather than simply rushing in blindly and adopting the latest trends:
By creating a profile on these sites, libraries also risk further legitimizing them, and encouraging users to be passive regarding their own privacy. If libraries take a comprehensive view of privacy as a core value, encouraging their users to use products that do not have the same regard for privacy should give librarians pause. Furthermore, it raises the issue of the role that libraries should play in actively promoting awareness about the priacy issues inherent to these sytems.
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