Your Space or MySpace?

About a year ago, my 15-year-old daughter Nell confessed that she never answered my email because she never saw it. Strange, I thought, because I saw Nell online all the time. Why was opening Hotmail such a chore? Nell explained that if her friends wanted to reach her, they just left her mail in her MySpace inbox. After she gave me a quick MySpace tour, it occurred to me that libraries could benefit from having a presence on MySpace, too.

A short time later, in December 2005, Nell came to work with me and set up the Brooklyn College Library (BCL), NY, MySpace account. We went ahead in mid-March 2006 with the launch and employed two interns and one part-time student worker to click through a pool of nearly 4000 Brooklyn College students associated with the MySpace site. By mid-May, we had over 1700 new “friends,” all ready to receive invitations, announcements, unsolicited library instruction, and answers to their questions.

Library email lists and blogs are buzzing with the idea of libraries carving out a little space for themselves in the MySpace universe, or, what blogger danah boyd calls the “super public.” And why not? On MySpace.com, which became part of Rupert Murdoch's media empire in late 2005, users can post personal profiles containing their favorite books and movies, photos, and videos. They can email, chat, and post bulletins to those they accept as “friends.” The average user spends up to two hours per session on MySpace, according to Nielsen Net ratings. In fact, MySpace.com is so popular among younger generations, its search function ranks sixth among all search engines.

Given the popularity and reach of this powerful social network, libraries have a chance to be leaders on their college campuses and in the larger community by realizing the possibilities of using social networking sites like MySpace to bring their services to the public. At the time of this writing, BCL listed among its more than 1790 friends nearly two dozen libraries or librarians who have set up MySpace profiles.

Still, many librarians are stalled by indecision as to whether or not they should jump into the pool. The major media all too often portray MySpace as a tool for online predators and spammers rather than one for community outreach. But as Joanne Cameron of Palm Beach Community College, FL, suggested in a recent email to the Information Literacy Instruction email list (ili-l), librarians are suffering from “paralysis by analysis,” refusing to move forward into new ventures because they are overthinking.

Blogger Aaron Schmidt concurs that libraries are just not moving fast enough into the social networking sphere. In his January 6, 2006 “walking paper” entry he muses that the “more I think about it, the more I can't believe I haven't seen tons of blog posts about libraries and MySpace.” That was ages ago in the cyberuniverse. Since that post, MySpace has doubled in size, currently hosting more than 96 million profiles. Yet, even in January 2006, when its profile population hovered around 47 million, MySpace was still receiving more daily hits than Google. Who can keep up?

Luckily, keeping up is what it is all about for Millennials. These young “screen-agers” are clicking their way through endless photo galleries of friends, looking to top the next user's numbers with hundreds or even thousands of people signed on as their good buddies.

If it seems like a lot of pressure, it is. But peer pressure has always driven youth, and so they go on clicking and passing time that may have been otherwise spent, say, watching television or playing video games or talking on the phone or, even, perhaps, seeing people in person or reading books! Today, people stay tuned to their computers, managing their stables of friends and peeking into everyone's social space.

Then there are libraries. We're also concerned with keeping up, always on the chase to haul the users in, right? Libraries have been doing this breathlessly, especially in the last decade, when justifying our reason for being and showing numbers that say we matter have become critical to our survival.

Libraries that make the jump into MySpace will encounter their users in ways never experienced before. At the traditional reference desk, we meet our users briefly and learn little about them other than their question. We answer that request, see if any more help is needed, and then move on to our next encounter. Students in MySpace, on the other hand, are in a virtual playground. It takes a special kind of sophistication to assess their information needs in an environment that, while ideal for information exchange, is designed for casual interaction.

When your library lives part of its life in MySpace, you must decide from the outset how you will handle student comments posted on your profile. Will you let each comment go by without a countercomment? Will you take this new and intriguing opportunity to comment back to students willing to engage you in playful conversation? At BCL, we choose to comment but cloak our replies in the reference interview framework.

One of our first experiences with an online conversation with a student in MySpace revolved around a student's tongue-in-cheek, mock-surprise question, “Library? Library? I thought you were a clock!” Designed to look like Independence Hall in Philadelphia, our library is topped with a gold dome and wears a face of golden Roman numerals and golden arrows for its hands. From a giant's perspective, our library most certainly must look like a clock set out on a grassy green mantel. To that clock comment we gave the coy yet instructive reply, “In answer to your recent reference question, 'Library? Library? I thought you were a clock!' we know that you must be looking for our hours. Our hours are....”

By recognizing the student's mock-amazement in posing the original question, we started a playful and informative conversation and seized an unexpected opportunity to direct the student to our “real” library web site, where she can find not only the library hours but also test out our chiming bell tower, link into our databases, or send off a question to the Ask-a-Librarian service.

Students will take a library's presence in MySpace seriously, provided you take them seriously. They will have a genuine need for information (“Does the library computer have 'WordPerfect'??”), they will give feedback (“You need to do things about people on their cell phones”), and they will offer comments, interactions, and replies that will help your library gather user satisfaction information in a novel way.

In addition to individual exchanges with students either through public comments or private email sent through the MySpace mail system, one of the biggest advantages for an institution via MySpace is the ability to contact students easily en masse or through specific groups. MySpace offers both bulletin board and invitation features that let a user get the word out to many students at a time. BCL has used these features to advertise library internship positions, promote a summer weekend computer workshop series, and offer a chance for students to be selected as one of the library's “Top 8” friends.

Other libraries are also using MySpace as an excellent forum for announcing activities and services. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Undergraduate Library advertised its new game nights this past spring and publicized its innovative collection of video games and players through a MySpace events posting. The Loft @ ImaginOn, a place for teens at the Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County, offers a rich calendar of events on its MySpace profile, including Free Friday Flicks, Line Dancing for Teens, and a Girl Talk Book Club.

To realize the potential of MySpace, however, we must be proactive in reaching out to students. For example, at BCL, we take the initiative in commenting to students who have asked nothing more of us than to add them as one of our friends. We also put out flyers advertising our profile at the physical reference desk. When we get requests from students to add them as friends, we are curious about them and take the time to read their profiles.

Investing some time in this new social network can really pay dividends. In traditional or even some newer reference environments, such as at the physical reference desk or in chat sessions, we tend to learn little about our patrons. The students we find on MySpace, on the other hand, have much to say about who they are in all areas of their lives, from what their favorite books are to telling all who care to hear about their future career aspirations. Reading student profiles allows us to be a little playful with students and in some cases teach them about the library without their even asking for such information. For example, we suggested one student track down a certain call number after offering a small bit of virtual instruction in using the online catalog. The student followed the suggestion and was delighted to discover that the call number led him to his favorite book. How did the library know the title of the student's favorite book? It was listed in his MySpace profile.

Beyond outreach and general interaction with students, a presence in MySpace can also offer libraries the advantage of special interest groupings that can facilitate messaging and instruction. Special interests often define how we socialize, and this is no less true for social web sites than it is for live social encounters. A search through MySpace groups for a relevant keyword, for example, on “Brooklyn College,” brings up hundreds of Brooklyn College students associated with our campus. From the EMS service, the film society, the theater society, and many others, our students become known to us in ways we would not have been familiar without this tool.

Finding these groups on MySpace means that academic librarians with discipline-specific instruction and collection development responsibilities can do outreach to these students collectively in a new and exciting setting. The library can help users meet information needs that may not be tied to specific courses or individual research papers but that are nevertheless important for interests beyond, but still related to, the classroom. Public libraries that identify local groups through a MySpace search can do the same thing, reaching out and fulfilling particular information needs, as well as anticipating these needs, allowing libraries to be proactive with their information delivery.

As we all know, the combination of youth and technology can be a volatile mix. Kurt Schrader, an IT professional and blogger, wonders if MySpace will stay popular. Are the libraries that are just now beginning to consider investing time in maintaining a MySpace profile doing so right when young people may be thinking of abandoning the site? “If there's one thing that teens can't stand, it's when everyone they know is in on the secret,” Schrader writes. And yet, these same young people also recognize the rationality of the grownups seeking them out. As a Brooklyn College MySpace friend commented early in the history of our profile, “Wow.... Brooklyn College has to cater so much to the 'young' population that MySpace is apparently the most commonsense way to do it. And that is not a sarcastic statement. Sadly.”

Do libraries belong in MySpace? Why not establish a profile, and ask your students. They are often not terribly surprised to see us there, and a good many of them, once they do find the library in MySpace, will say, “You rock!”