I’m giving a workshop for English Majors today who are looking for jobs, and I decided to throw in my new project…teaching graduating seniors how to clean up their Facebook profiles. Posting the slides for anyone that wants to see them.

A month ago my best friend and roommate Kris started a blog and got onto Twitter. He is a procrastinating playwright, among other things (poet, cabaret artist, award-winning actor and director, teacher…), who is currently running away from a very fine play he has started called 10 Mile. He is a storyteller and general pontificator in the grandest Deep South tradition. Discovering a medium where it is permissable to not-edit and not-judge and not-worry about writing has been a watershed experience for him. He is committed to his blog with an energy and enthusiasm I have rarely seen, set free of the torment and conflict that accompanies other kinds of writing. And now he is linking to this blog on his site. Currently the link is titled “best librarian in the entire world (wide web),” and he is posting excerpts from my blog.

One of the things I struggle with is creating with and managing online identity, and subsequently privacy. I consider my online life to be largely a professional life, but as I said at CiL2009 on the Managing Identity on Social Networks panel, I believe it is not possible to truly separate the professional and personal. Generally my approach has been to use privacy settings and judicious boundaries to control my identity online. Perhaps it goes without saying that Kris has a vastly different idea of judicious.

So once again, I’m back at the drawing board. As his editor, I would never want to stifle his creativity. There isn’t really anything wrong at all with his blog or his right to mention me or our life in it. It’s just not what I expected. At the same time that Kris has come into his own online, my family has gained momentum on Facebook. I now have 18 people on my mother’s side alone on Facebook. That’s right. Eighteen people. It was one thing when my brother or sister-in-law made the occasional comment on my Facebook page. It’s an entirely different thing to have my mother, cousins, aunts and uncles omnipresent.

So I’m calling it a developmental challenge…and I’m testing out my theory that creating and managing identity online is a series of developmental challenges that are necessary for growth. I’m just not exactly certain what that involves.

One of the things I’ve learned is that there is a challenge to the real-life relationship that goes along with these online developments. I’ve had conversations with my mother about what I want people to see about me on my Facebook page. I helped calm her anxiety about the difference between her news feed and her Wall when unexpected things appeared. I even deleted a Wall comment from my aunt that I thought revealed too much information about my grandmother. Now we are all on a private family Facebook Group, where we can share pictures and stories without the world watching.

And Kris. The respect we have for each other in person extends to the online world. And why wouldn’t it? Protecting and nurturing his creativity is a mission I have taken on with joy and great relish. And he is inordinately proud of my work and would never ever want to embarrass me. So every day, just like with the rest of his work, he reads his blogs aloud to me when I get home. He looks for my reaction as his editor and his friend. But if he’s used my name or a story about me, he’s looking for something more. Really we are all working together to find our balance.

Well, I haven’t blogged for an entire semester. I took the Graphic Novels class (excellent), did costumes and crewed our Community Theatre’s entry in the MS Theater Competition (won that competition, won the regional competition, and headed to nationals in June), and appeared on a panel at a national conference among other things. But I’m back to blogging, largely as a result of giving up on peer-reviewed publications on social networking topics. I’ve moved on to the much simpler Virtual Reference topics for which I have copious data. With that in full swing, I don’t have to feel like I’m cheating on my research by blogging. Or that is what I currently believe.

So I’ve been bottling up tons of ideas hoping to turn one magically into a paper, and now I need to get them out. So here they come…ready or not.

I’m deep into writing the paper. The running title is Social Networking as Ethical Discourse: Toward a Practical and Normative Ethic for Librarianship. I stole the subtitle from John Budd’s amazing paper in The Library Quarterly, which has guided and inspired me. It’s due to the editor on the 31st, and I promised a draft to my readers on Monday. So it’s nose to the grindstone. Well, except that after a rocky day yesterday, my Kris took me out to karaoke. I don’t sing but he does, and if you ever get a chance, I highly recommend going to hear him. Really amazing. So I have his pic up on this post in tribute to his friendship.

We’ve launched the Libraries’ facebook group. I’m pretty much beside myself about it. We’ve already got 89 members, and we haven’t even got all the posters up in the dorms yet. The news story just went up on the page yesterday. Everyone in the library is really supportive of it–and I’ve become our Facebook Librarian.

Back to the paper! But more to come….

Amanda

This is an edited ersion of what I gave to my Dean when she asked for a “library vision.” It’s part of what keeps rolling around in my head:

I have been thinking so much about the future of libraries in general lately. What I keep trying to figure out is how we can serve our patrons most effectively as the learning environment is constantly changing. Our patrons are more and more empowered in their ability to create information-gathering systems of their own, bad or good (blogging, wikis, etc.). They have learned how to search Google and find information on their own. And they seem to like it! This is a blessing and a curse for the people trying to teach them how to find “good” research, etc. But how can the library adapt and reach these students effectively when they are so independent?

One development stands out for me–students are increasingly using social networking sites and appear to be moving their “lives” into online space ( “live-Web” or “Web 2.0”). I want to find out how they are gathering information now and how the library can insert itself in this process. Our goal is always to facilitate excellence in research and learning, and this might be one way for us to move into their “space” and become part of their new, active way of obtaining information. How can we become one of the main tools they use to find answers?

The answer, for me, is that libraries and librarians should be ubiquitous—available whenever and wherever they need us. With declining desk figures it has been hard to figure out where they are. However, an overwhelming numbers of 18-25 year olds actively using online social networks such as Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, etc There are 2600 current MSU students on MySpace. There are 56 Groups in Facebook associated with Mississippi State University. Doing a search on Flickr (social networking with photography) yields 24,100 pictures associated tags about Mississippi State University.

We have so many new tools at hand. For example deli.ci.ous.com and furl.com both provide social bookmarking services. They save web pages in personal accounts that can then be tagged with metadata and shared with anyone. I can’t wait to find a way to use this in reference—maybe we could gather a selection of web pages together for a reference consultation or on a reference subject guide. Searching on the metatag “Mississippi” in deli.ci.ous.com, 2500 bookmarked web pages include some information about Mississippi, the first being on the “Geological Investigation of the Alluvial Valley of the lower Mississippi.” Because these pages are marked as important by this group, it’s more likely that someone in the group will use them—it’s another way of doing collection development, but this time organizing information on the web for our patrons’ benefit.

Another example might be teaching graduate students or faculty in a consultation about using a wiki (an open, editable web resource) for gathering their research information and sharing it with others. Pbwiki.com has a template created for researchers to record their thoughts, upload files, and then share their work with colleagues in a sort of web-repository. It could be a place where working papers or other grey literature could be collected and reviewed by a larger community.

I want the library to try to find the patrons where they are by using the same tools they are using to navigate their way around the world today. And then I want to help them to find the best information available using the best sources available.