In many of the article I've read for my literature review, I see librarians give glowing recommendations for social-networking sites like Facebook as tools to "create and market library services" ... That may very well be true, but the problem with those articles (and I see it in this article as well) is that the authors offer very little in the way of hard data to actually back up their claims; the "evidence" provided is either skewed to better reflect their already-established opinions, or they fail to take the actual patrons' input into account.
This article, for example, examines the results of a 2008 survey on the use of Facebook by academic health sciences libraries as a marketing/promotional tool ... While the authors eventually decided that the "small number of actual libraries using Facebook" at the time made the resulting data inconclusive, there were still some details that (in my opinion) were "glossed over" when they were establishing their argument.
Let me give an example: Of the 72 librarians who responded to the survey, only nine reported that their libraries maintained a Facebook page, and (of that number) thirty-four percent of their total "fans" were "employees of the same library" ... In other words, over one-third of the library's "fans" were other librarians; now, that doesn't really speak very highly for Facebook as a "marketing" tool, when you're pretty much only talking to other members of the same staff!
That's not all, however ... Reading the results a little more closely, we see that the authors use the phrase "of the same library" when describing these employees; now, there's no indication that the other 66 percent of the "fans" couldn't have been librarians from other institutions who were looking to network! As such, the percentage of "fans" of these libraries who were actual patrons (the people that marketing tools are supposed to be targeting) might be even lower than this report would have us believe; there's just no way of knowing with the way that the data is presented here.
The results of this survey, as reported by the authors, go on to say that many of the librarians that maintain Facebook pages "felt more positive about the future success of their library's Facebook page", while 28 percent of the librarians who do not maintain Facebook pages believe that "Facebook demonstrated little to no utility in an academic setting" ... This all sounds well and good, but statements like these are replacing hard evidence with opinions and conjecture. Not only that, but it's leaving out the most crucial element: patron input.
If the librarians surveyed bothered to actually find out what their users thought of Facebook as a part of the online presence provided by academic health sciences libraries, it's not evident in the article; we're merely left to speculate on guesswork. After all, when the authors use a phrase like "positive feelings", are the librarians they're questioning basing that on user feedback, or do they just have a "hunch"? On the flip side, when the other librarians dismiss Facebook as having "little to no utility" in an academic setting, do their patrons feel the same way, or are they simply making a kneejerk reaction without taking their opinions into account?
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