 Hello and welcome to this week's Encompass Live. I'm Krista Burns, your host. Encompass Live is Nebraska Library Commission's weekly online event. We cover NLC activities, any library of topics that may be of interest to Nebraska libraries and librarians. We do this every Wednesday at 10 a.m. Central Time. It is free, it is online, and it is recorded for future listening if you need to. This morning we have Susan Franklin from Hastings Public Library who will be taking us through putting Facebook to work for your library and talking about what they did with using Facebook for the Perkins Library at Hastings College. Go ahead Susan. Hello everyone, thank you for joining us and I appreciate your patience as I move through my first time presenting in Central Live. Hopefully you won't know the difference. My goal today is not to show you how necessarily to set up a Facebook page for your library but to show you how we are using it to do some of the work that a library needs to get done. And really it just enhances which we'll get into that. Everything you already do. So it provides one more outlet or way to accomplish the goals and duties of your library. Okay, so what is Facebook and who uses it? Facebook is a social utility that helps people communicate more efficiently with their friends, family, and coworkers. And what Facebook does basically, they've coined this term social graph. So they're digitally mapping your real world social connections. So in other words, in a personal way, you can connect through Facebook to your elementary school chums, to your high school chums, to former teachers, to college mentors, to family and friends all across the world, colleagues, etc. So what Facebook does is make that connection live again. And some of those connections, at least for me, have not been live for a long time. Facebook's mission is to make the world more open and connected. And it's doing a pretty spiffy job. There are over 175 million active users, supposed to be minimum age 13. Of course, we know that there are younger kids on it. And question mark as to how old the oldest users are. Facebook is officially a pop culture icon. It seems wherever you go, someone is talking about Facebook. It's applications and memes. So much copied and widely distributed ideas, or in the case of Facebook lists, those of you who have Facebook accounts know about the 25 things meme, which asks you to tell 25 things about yourself and then your friends, family, and whatnot get to comment on those 25 things. The 25 things is so widely known that people are writing about it in the New York Times, they're writing about it in things like Entertainment Weekly. Just last week, as I was starting to prepare for this presentation, of course, Facebook redesigned launched its new redesign. So in Entertainment Weekly, fearing the new Facebook redesign made its pop culture big events of the week, which is sort of funny. Okay. Statistics who is on Facebook, the 35 to 54 year old demographic has grown 276.4% in six months, which is crazy. The 55 plus demo is not far behind with 194.3 growth rate. And the 25 to 34 year population of Facebook is doubling every six months. So in other words, guess what? Facebook is where your users are. And as anyone who deals in publicity or social networking will tell you, we need to be following our users. This you're not going to be able to see really clearly on the slide, but I'm going to give you a sort of brief history of Facebook. I'm not going to get too bogged down, but it came on the scene in 2004. And originally it was Harvard students, college students only. It was simply a directory. So it listed your name, your contact info, a picture and your interests. And it was work intensive. So if you wanted to find out what picture Krista had posted, or what Michael's contact info was, or what Carolyn had recently put on her page, you actually had to go to the person's page and look. And you'll see as we get to that point, that has changed. In 2005, Facebook opened itself to professionals, students from other colleges and even high school students. In 2006, a news feed was added which highlighted friend information on your own home page. So instead of me having to go to Michael's page to get his updates, now his updates are coming to my home page displaying on my home page when I log in, which is a wonderful thing in terms of ease. In 2007, the term social graph was coined to describe how Facebook maps out people's connections. And again, it's important to remember that these connections exist in the real world. All Facebook does is map them out and facilitate the ease with which you maintain these connections. So ostensibly, as a library, you know, you want your users and community members and patrons to friend you. You don't, you're not looking to have friends or members that are complete strangers to your library if that makes sense in the same way that I don't want Facebook friends who are complete strangers to me. So Facebook maps out real world connections. In 2008, Facebook had a redesign graphically which made the wall the central focus. And this was a huge step in the direction of helping people share immediate experiences. So you could throw up a thought, a status, a photo, a note, a feeling. And everyone could see it. And it was a great way to let people know in real time how you as an individual or you as a library what you're doing, what you're feeling, what you're working on, et cetera. In 2006, another change was made. Companies, government entities, organizations, et cetera, were encouraged to join Facebook as, you know, I'm not sure, as pages. I'm a little unclear because when Hastings College started its Facebook presence, you couldn't have an institutional profile. So you had to have a group page and we'll get to that. And then just last week, a merge, two weeks ago, March 11th, shift happened. Facebook underwent another redesign. The layout is different. The emphasis of information is streamed. So it's more of a real time flow than even before. And then public figures, celebrities, organizational profiles, look, act, and display their content more like personal ones. And that content is integrated onto your personal page just as the information that your friends and family and personal contacts are posting. 2010, what's going to happen with Facebook? Your guess is as good as mine. Is everyone still with me? Yes. Excellent. Okay. All right. So the value of a web-based social networking system is fairly simple. Facebook, and of course, there are other sites, but Facebook is, makes the most sense to me. Facebook allows you to translate your personal or institutional self into an online presence or entity. So moving your library to a cyber presence. It allows you to make connections to family, friends, colleagues, patrons, and others. And again, based on existing real-world contacts. Then you can base connections on similar interests, activities, hobbies, groups, et cetera. So you can find people who are also members of American Library Association or you can connect with the folks at the Nebraska Library Commission, things of that nature. And you can share contact and interact. So you can comment, you can contribute, you can get feedback, you can have dialogue with your connections. Tech guru David Lee King predicts that an eye-thru and effective social networks will someday be like air. That is to say they will be integrated seamlessly into our lives. And for some of us, they already are. If you're a Facebooker, you're getting email notices, you're checking it. Some people Twitter, people have blogs. So David Lee King is saying that it's going to happen. We're going to be surrounded by social networks. And he says that there are three things needed to make social networks like air. The first is identity, who you are. So you need to carry that out consistently across social networks. Contacts, who you know. So presumably no matter what social network you're using, your contacts are going to remain the same because they are real world contacts. And then activities, what you do. As I said, Facebook is just one way to experiment with integrating social networks into your library. And the great thing is, it is as easy as Kings 123, quite literally. So the first step, identity, who you are. Facebook says it's a customizable presence for an organization, product or public personality to join the conversation with Facebook users. And those statistics where I said, your users are on Facebook, that's where they are. For example, my direct users, college students, most of them have Facebook accounts. Some of them are slightly too extremely addicted to Facebook. And they're already there. It's just we need to be there. And to do that, you translate the essence of your library, of who you are as a library, into a Facebook page that then speaks volumes about your information, your users or your fans, if you have a page, your events, your photos and video, your wall and your updates. Pause, and I don't want to be confusing, but when Perkins Library started its Facebook presence, Facebook was anti-institutional. It was anti-organizational. It said that a library or a store or a company could not have a profile. You could only have individual profiles. So Susan Franklin had an individual profile. Then, if you wanted a presence on Facebook for your library, company, business, organization, you had to create a group page. So we created a student named it because it speaks to who we are and what we do. I recline on couches living on coffee and J-Store, Friends of Perkins Library. Group in Facebook. Several years later or a year later, Facebook became non-anti-institutional and we contemplated switching, but the disadvantages, so migrating our content, making our members rejoin a page, losing certain functions and utilities seemed too large of a task. So we decided if it ain't broke, don't fix it. The caveat is this may change. Now that pages have undergone another redesign and another utility change in that now the, as I said, the information is seamlessly integrated, we may want to make a change, but I'm not quite convinced we're going to do that yet. Stay tuned. All right, group versus page. Our group, we have basic and contact info, officers, members, events, discussion board, wall, photos, links, and video. And a crook coercion, any way we can get them, including Facebook badges on our webpage, which Facebook at the bottom of your profile or your page, you can actually at the bottom of your personal profile, there's a clickable button create a badge and it's really easy. You plug in the coding and there you go. Word of mouth. We have signage in our computer labs. Hey, we're on Facebook. We put that we have a Facebook presence on all of our library literature, brochures, flyers, training handouts. We promote it to our colleagues on campus statewide and nationally. Of course, we have some people who are interested in what we're doing at the library because they are our personal friends and family. We have members who are student assistants and library groupies. And yes, we have them. Free coffee might be the reason, but we have them. Media outlets, we promote in our HC announcements, which is our daily email announcement to staff, faculty and students. We take the opportunities when they arise, when we have events to get the word out in our college newspaper, TV station and radio station. And then we also have alliances with professional association or entities, such as HC Broncos has a profile, a local bakery has a profile who is one of our members. So any way you can get them. Now, if you're in a school environment, you know, I would recommend having some guidelines for friending if you're doing a group, but with the page that should be taken care of, I think. All right. And then finally, third activity is what you do. And here is to me where the true value of Facebook is. As I said, it gives you one more place to carry out the core activities you already do. So your programming, your services, such as reference, your library instruction, your public relations or visibility, connecting with patrons, the list is endless. Everything you do in your brick and mortar building in the course of operating your library, you can translate that into Facebook. Hang on slide. There we go. This is simply what we do on Facebook. So these are some examples. We use Facebook to inform and announce, to create events and gather RSVPs, to provide reference, to nurture network and professional collections, and also to collaborate, to connect with our users and provide a way to converse with them about feedback concerns. And then instruction and library skills. And finally, publicity, telling the story of your library. All right. So inform and announce. Obviously, you have basic information on their hours. We post our break information. We post special events. We post our contests. So one more way to get the word out. Now, does this replace putting an email in Hastings College announcements? Does it replace hanging flyers in the dorms and in the buildings? No, of course not. But one more way to get the word out. And you'll notice Katherine Brockmeyer from NLC posted yesterday, best of luck on Encompass live tomorrow. So I appreciated that. Events and RSVPs. So Facebook gives you a utility for creating an event and allows you to spread the word very easily. You create an invitation. You send it to members and whomever you want to get it. People are able to say, yes, I'm attending. I may be attending. No, I'm not attending. And again, part of the fun part is, even if someone is, even our students abroad, can participate in our on-campus events through Facebook by posting wish I could be there or whatever the case may be. So I'm going to try to go back out. And no, that's not what I wanted. Bear with me one second while I find my group. So we have an upcoming event. And it's a video contest in honor of National Library Week. And so you can see we're the host. It makes you put a type of event. So I put causes rally, the time, start time, end time. Okay, hang on. Sorry about the roller coaster. Not sure why it's closing. You can describe it. And then this is where you invite people to come. And you can, you'll notice we have four confirmed guests. I just posted this on Monday, I think. No one has written anything yet. But it's a way to invite people and get participation. All right. So we have used, we've used the events and creating an event on Facebook for our band book celebration, our Halloween celebration, our gingerbread decorating event, and our YouTube contest. But you could use it for anything. Hey, this is National Library Workers Day. You could use it for observances to not just physical, you need to be here, events, if that makes sense. Reference in Reader's Advisory. Within Facebook, you can instant message and you can also message much as you have an inbox and outbox. And you'd be amazed. I'm hoping you can see the screenshot. But it's amazing to me. Facebook reference questions and Reader's Advisory have, Facebook has replaced email for most of my students. They can see that I'm online. They can pop up a chat box and say, you know, I'm trying to get into an e-book. I'm having trouble. What do I do? So it's quick. It's easy. It's point of need. Some funny examples. Fairly frequently someone will pop up a chat window and say, you know, I'm having problems in a database and I'll say, okay, well, which database are you in? And they'll say, well, I'm in the back corner in the computer lab in the library. And so I'll just get up and go to them. But it serves the purpose because they have windows open. They're in the middle of a search. They get stuck. They don't want to abandon the computer and someone else to come along. So it makes sense. And it's really convenient. Network collaborating professional collections, indispensable. From campus, local, regional, statewide, nationally, groups and collaborations. So staff, faculty, even the Hastings College Facebook presence, they're all our members or friends. Local librarians, Linda Gardner, that's you. You're right here in Hastings, different library. Nebraska Regional Library System. Librarians and members. Some of the system administrators are on Facebook. But Cynthia, Claudette, Carolyn, you're in my region. So that's one way we could connect more regularly than we do. Other Nebraska colleges and libraries. So Dana, UNL, Wesley and I know that they all have presences on Facebook. And they're my personal friends. And also I am, we are reciprocally members of one another's library groups as well. State level, Nebraska Library Commission has a page. I have national library contacts, people that I have met at conventions or in other ways. You can belong to interest groups. So anything like American Library Association, ACRL, different divisions of ALA, special interest groups like intellectual freedom or using technology to teach. You can find those and participate in them through Facebook. There are instructive groups like library secrets is one of my favorite. And it is College of DuPage is one of their librarians page that gives tips and tricks on how to use the library, how to conduct research, how to use resources. And then I've used Facebook to collaborate both in a work group with three other people across the nation and to put together an NLA NEMA presentation. So again, it's whatever you want it to be, however you can think of to use it. Susan? Yes? There's a question from the text chat. Actually earlier Catherine said hi with Michael. I missed that earlier. Okay. But he also was asking about when you're doing the text chat. Is that generally done via the chat or messaging? Chat. Michael, are you chattable at the moment? Okay. Hang on. So you'll see over here. Oh, hang on. Where are you, Michael? He's on his Facebook right now. Is that what you're talking about? I was talking about Facebook chat. Sorry, not to be confusing. It looks like he's going to... Yes. So Michael, when you log on, if you'll chat me up, we can demonstrate. And again, the thing about using Facebook instant messaging is if your users are already on, they can see that you are online. And literally I have Facebook on every single time I am on a computer, whether it's at home or at work. And that means it's not unusual at 10.30 at night for a student to say, here's my research topic. I'm stuck. What do you recommend? Or how do I get my hands on this? So if... Exactly. So you can see Michael popped up and actually you can see it has a history. I had asked him... Or did you... No, I had asked him yesterday, but he went offline. So we can carry on a nice little reference interview or whatever the case may be. Whoops. And you have to type correctly. But it's as easy as that. I also have people who... I'm going to close this window, Michael. I also have people who... Uh-oh. I did it just as you were. Sorry. For extended questions, I do have people who prefer to Facebook message me instead of sending an email. They're already in there. They check Facebook message more frequently than they do their Hastings College accounts. And so it just... Yes, Michael. I can't have typing skills. I do. I need to... I can have Cheeseburger Cat. So either way, again, I tell people when I'm training, I tell students when I go into the classroom, I do not care how you contact me when you need help or have a question. I don't care if you email me, pop into my office, call me on the telephone, call me on my home phone, instant message me, message me in Facebook or send a carrier pigeon. It does not matter to me how they get to me as long as they get to me when they have a need. All right. Does that answer the question about chatting? Yes? Okay. I'm going to continue then. Connecting and dialoguing. So again, you're visible to students, staff and faculty. What you're doing, what you're posting is right there in front of people. And I'm going to go to my own profile. And I'm going to tell everyone I am giving an encompass live presentation online right now. And I'm going to share it. So there it goes. So now, anyone who is friends with me is seeing that I am giving an encompass live presentation online right now. And you'll see, go ahead. Sure. Go for it. And in the meantime, I will bring to your attention down at the end, or down at the bottom here, you can post links, photos, videos. I'll skip that one. Flare, library love. You can do a variety of applications and sharing all right here, which is one of the new enhancements of Facebook, which is great. So here's what you just did. I do. There we go. See, so now anyone who's friends with me knows that that is what I am doing right this very second. This is good. All right. I'm going to switch back over. So connecting and having an open dialogue, visible to students, staff, faculty, our members. They can leave comments and feedback. They can write on our wall. We can post on our own wall. So here, the inbox messaging and instant message utilities. And also, Facebook gives us a way to stay in touch with foreign exchange students. So after students come from other countries and study here for a semester or a year, we can keep in touch with them for forever, as well as our students who are here and then go abroad to study and also alum. So again, that's one of the values of social networking tools such as Facebook. Those connections are there for life or until you decide to break them. And I've given just a few examples of things we've connected with, posted. Thanks for the hot cocoa. Even though I currently make my living at another library, Perkins will forever claim my deepest loyalties. While I wish Hastings and North Platt were closer, so I could have decorated and consumed gingerbread men and women, I noticed from the pictures that there were definitely both sexes involved. Of course, we were not sexist in our celebration. You can also do library instruction and teaching of library skills within Facebook, which is great. So in your applications and boxes section, which we're going to go to in a second, you can use WorldCat within Facebook. You can use JSTOR within Facebook. And I won't read these to you, but you can see that I have, every time we do discover a tool that is used in Facebook, we promote it. So we put it on our webpage. We put it in HC announcements. So again, you have to, just because you're doing Facebook, you don't abandon the other things you're already doing. It's just one more way. So if we go over to AppShare, we are going, okay. So in my boxes, you can see, you can search on JSTOR provided that your library uses JSTOR. You can search within Facebook. So imagine how nice and convenient that is for students, particularly because they're already in Facebook. So if they're using JSTOR for research, they don't even have to log on to our databases. They can do it, log on to our databases in Facebook, which is just amazing. Also, you'll see a bunch of other fun stuff. Here are my LOL cats. Here are my pieces of flair. Here are my postcards. Good thing I brought my library card because I'm checking you out. Sorry I called, emailed, or I emmed you from three feet away, which couldn't be more true. But again, here's Worldcat. So whatever your, I don't know why buses popped into my head, but whatever you want to find, there you go. Worldcat right there in Facebook. Amazing, amazing, amazing. All right. Publicity and telling your story. So we document with, yes? Then Michael has another question and a text chat. Wanted to know if groups can chat? Meaning like when you're logged in, are you logged in as yourself or has Hastings College? I am logged in as myself. Groups can chat in terms of, it depends on what you mean by a group. Like HC Broncos, that's their profile. So it's an entity. Michael, what did you have in mind? Can you log in as like Hastings College? But I don't think that's how it works. No. We each have a profile and then the students can see. And on our home page, whoops. Can you see the screen? No, I didn't. Hang on. Okay. On our home page, we have our Facebook badges. And we're small enough that our users know us by first name. So they can simply click on, they can click on online friends and see that Bob Netterm, I mean, I can see Chris is on there. So I'm going to pop up a chat when I have a question and chat with her. Does that answer the question? Probably correct, although I'm not the person to ask since we don't have a page, but I have never seen like, I've never seen NLC or Grootcock Library show up in my friend's thing when I'm chatting. So I don't, um, yeah, I mean, it's the thing where they are only the students who are already friends with us personally or whatever are going to contact us in that way. Does that make sense? It's one more way. However, they all know that we are on Facebook and you can message some, you can message anyone on Facebook without being a friend. So I have instances where students, you know, don't want to be my friend. They have no interest in being my friend, but they will still message me and I'll get a notification that I have a message in my inbox and I can communicate with them, answer them without us having to be friends. Does that make sense? All right, so the publicity and telling your story. We document all of our displays and things through photos. So you can see right now we have a women's history month display. Oops, sorry. You can see our gingerbread event and on and on. Every display, every, this was our band books edible event, which this is an awesome cake, the Great Gatsby cake, the famous cover. So again, it tells, by putting the photos on Facebook, it tells our story. It documents what we're doing and it lets people interact. So someone who is not, who's a former student said of the Art Deco frosting, perfect. So otherwise we wouldn't have had an interaction or a connection with that former student. All right. Here we go. So that was as easy as one, two, three, right? You create your identity. You let people know that you're on Facebook, invite them to, and with a page again, it's much easier I would assume with a page because the page isn't going to see your family vacation pictures and whatnot. So that layer of privacy is taken away. And then your activities. So this one, two, three gives you increased visibility and avenues for service to your patrons. And to reiterate, as I said, Facebook is simply one more place we can connect with each other as professionals, as librarians, as library workers, and our patrons. It's where you can experiment, adapt, adjust, explore how to use it for your benefit. Just because we use it in the ways I've outlined for you doesn't mean that that's going to work for your particular library type or environment. So the key is, as with anything else, model yourself after others, experiment, adapt, adjust, explore. Even if Facebook doesn't have exactly what you want, it's a worthwhile endeavor. As Kristen and I were talking about, just wait a month. Facebook might be able to accommodate your specific need if you just give it a little time. Because it's social, it's going to keep on changing. It's participants, you wouldn't believe the number of people, the number of groups that are complaining about the new Facebook redesign, demanding changes, this, that, the other thing. And Facebook listens to its users. And so it will keep refining and adding and changing. And so you just have to be able to go with the change. As I said, we use it to inform, invite, announce, instruct, network, connect, document, engage, publicize, communicate, and probably things I'm missing. The possibilities are simply endless. Here are some tips for adopting Facebook, and they are adapted from 10 social networking tips for libraries by the librarian in Black. So do research. Whether that research is reading articles about how to implement it, whether it's the help pages in Facebook, whether it is looking at the group sites or the pages of libraries that are similar to you, do your research. See how people are using it and how you might like to use it. Be dynamic. You cannot expect people to like your page or return to your page or use your Facebook presence if you're not dynamic. So you need to post links or video or tips or information or pictures. You need to be adding content for people to interact with. Use a photo that puts a face on your library. Right now we have a picture of our library. Eventually I would like to have our actual shining, smiling faces. Number four is hidden in there but it is very important. Have fun with it. As I said, this is an environment where you can show a lighter side. You can pick out humorous, funny links and information and push it to people to get them to interact with you. Adapt. As I said, change is going to happen. You just have to roll with it and know when to cut bait. So if you think Facebook could work for you and you try it and you've given it enough time and it's not serving your needs, it's not worth your time, ditch it. There might be another social networking tool that is more appropriate for your needs and then go find it and do the same thing. Do all of this same stuff in that environment. Questions. Questions you can ask on your microphone if you have one or put it in the text chat. We've got that up. Anything more you wanted to know about what they're doing or anything that you guys have maybe done? Yeah. Or elsewhere that you want to share. Thanks, Laura. Repeat the questions. As far as Krista said, we'd be interested in knowing if anyone has experimented in Facebook. What you've done, if you have any ideas, no? Okay. I hope to see you all on Facebook soon. Please. Yes. Oh, sorry. I was getting some feedback there. Yes. Claudette, you're exactly right. Some schools may block Facebook. That is, you know, that's something your IT people and your policy people have to negotiate. You have to negotiate with them. I will just tell you that there are so many pieces of research, pieces of solid evidence that Facebook isn't just, you know, it's not just a fun and games thing. It is a tool. And yes, you can get bogged down. There are all sorts of applications. You can vampire bite people. You can send little green plants to people. You can do all sorts of things. You can play all sorts of games. But it's how you use it. It's just as with anything else. The internet, you know, you can do the same things on the internet. And I realize schools have privacy issues. But I would definitely make a case for the usefulness of Facebook. And I don't know how easy it will be for you to convince your IT people or the people who make the policies. But it's where the students are. It's where you should be too. Okay. Claudette, does that give you a nice non-answer? Michael, I can't seem to, my cursor's frozen. I cannot seem to open your link. That's a group that was set up by people here in Lincoln for the South Branch, Lincoln City Library South Branch Library location possibly being closed. They set up a group in Facebook to get people to sign up and get the news out and still, you know, work towards trying to keep it from being closed. And so there's a group in Facebook called Save the South Branch Library group. That is awesome. Again, one more way for Facebook to be used in a way that, you know, how wonderful. I don't have to go to South Branch to sign a petition. I can do it from my jammies at home. So advocacy, that's one more thing you can add to the list of things you can do. As I said, use it, make it your own. Whatever your needs are, they're going to be different from my needs or NLC's needs or, you know, whatever. So that's awesome. Other questions? Laura said that at this presentation, she's going to go and make a Facebook page for their library, the Stanton Public Library. That's wonderful. And that brings me back to hope to see you on Facebook soon. You'll of course have a personal profile before you can set up a page. And I would encourage you to friend me. And I'm more, I definitely want to join your groups. And I didn't cover any of the procedural stuff. It's pretty intuitive. It's pretty easy to set your stuff up. If you have questions about that process or anything that I didn't cover that is the nitty gritty sort of stuff of setting up a Facebook page, please let me know. You have my email address, my work phone number. You can Facebook me, email me, call me. I'm more than happy to help. If there are no other questions, thank you very, very much. Oh, hey, look at that. That's awesome. Thank you very much. Thanks a lot, Susan. That was great, definitely. So thank you very much for attending today. It was recorded. This will be available a little bit later today or tomorrow. Hope you'll join us next week for our next week's Encompass Live where Sally Snyder from the Nebraska Library Commission will be talking about summer reading programs and who chooses to see how that all goes down. Thanks a lot. Bye bye.