As we academic librarians consider establishing a presence in social space, I've been thinking about the cultural shift this would mean for us. We are so accustomed to bringing users into our online space and on our terms. A library's Web site is a prime example. It's ours: our design, our architecture, our vocabulary, our content. The better sites are developed through an iterative process, in which feedback is sought as resdesigns take place in order to guide subsequent redesigns. In spite of all this, the site is still under our complete control and is usually a one-way street.

The notion of requiring users to come to us is paramount among academic librarians whose primary role is to provide research support and to instruct. It makes sense to do these things within our own online parameters. Besides, there haven't been well-identified alternatives until recently.

The social networking sites I've looked at are interesting possibilities, but only up to a point. They have a basic limitation in that each profile/site is controlled by the creator. Users can contribute comments - of course a valuable thing - but that's about it. There isn't true collaboration in the creation of these spaces. Rather, sites such as MySpace and Facebook provide a relatively relaxed offsite environment for peddling our services, providing support and deriving user feedback. This isn't a bad thing - in fact it's potentially a very good thing - but it isn't as revolutionary as some make it out to be.

This is why I don't think participation in such spaces merits angsty debates in the academic library community. Reaching out to users on social sites can gain us some good will, and more importantly might be a boon to users if we actually provide services to them there. And "there" could be any number of places depending on the trends. We may very well end out following users from one Next Great Social Site to another. So what? They have been coming to our spaces for years.

Now a wiki: that would make for an interesting librarian-user collaboration. I'll save this thought for another posting.

If you want to explore more about all this, check out the blog posting about social networking by Meredith Farkas especially for its list of resources on this topic. Also take a look at the MySpace profile of the Perry-Castaneda Library to get an idea of what we might do. Consider what a library school course on this topic would look like if we want our successors to be tuned into social networking as librarians beyond the role of consumers that many of them already are.