My take is probably funds, liability management, and image management.

As a nation we have a lot of knee-jerk people that will complain loudly about any 'wasted money', where someone tries to broaden the scope of their assigned mission. A university that appeared to cater to non-students might be the target of such an accusation. Limiting an audience to campus-only participants would impose awareness of the presence of the university -- which would affect what topics are discussed, who would participate and to what extent they would participate.

Next, we have Homeland Security preserving us from danger, and the Justice department preserving us from nekkid pictures and, I guess, district attorneys that don't staff their office to support incumbent congressmen in elections. Both organizations routinely litigate against whoever hosts suspect web sites -- that is, sites that they decide are unamerican. This requires the university to monitor and take a certain amount of responsibility for the content of it's online content. Open forums often stray, for a short or extended period of time, into impolite behavior. Some impoliteness rises to illegal threats and cyber terrorism, and occasionally spills over to mundane world violence. Most universities are a bit conservative, about being held accountable for such behavior.

It takes skill and time to raise a community and a forum that maintains focus and value to the community, and avoids impoliteness and other trolls. It can be very daunting for the first few years, keeping everyone safe while growing and nurturing a contributing community. Facebook is to be commended for providing the framework to support so many. They also commit a significant investment in equipment and time, which a university would need to account for.

Brad, Thanks for your comment. You paint a dark picture, and I don't agree that building campus-based online communities would entail so many risks. Many of the problems you cite can also be associated with campus-hosted e-mail. And for years many campuses have given their users server space to host personal Web sites. Have there been major problems with this? Have you followed the campus-wide UThink blog project at the University of Minnesota?

I think we have reasons to be optimistic about such communities. This doesn't mean I expect "perfect" behavior on the part of its members. I've already written about what I see as the realities of radical trust, so I don't think I've got a starry-eyed view of this!

Does your campus have a "responsible use" policy that sets out guidelines for using the campus network? Mine does, and it serves as a good-faith effort that "establishes basic rights for all users and describes expectations for responsible use to ensure those rights."

Hi Laura,

I'm afraid on this one I'm going to have to disagree with you!

Do you really think that students would opt out of facebook and myspace to use significantly inferior community spaces that have less history with them, are starting from scratch, will get less take up, less features, more censorship, and can't let them talk to their friends at other institutions?

There's so many things that are great about facebook, but in particular they have years of experience and a relationship with the students. No library/institution could possibly compete.

But this is the point - there's no need to compete. I thought a big part of web2 was the "cooperate, don't control" mindset. It's Jakob's law: online services are best designed when they take advantage of the fact the users spend most of their time on sites other than yours.

This is positive! You wouldn't try to create a new youtube just for your library because lots of students are on it and libraries are missing the boat? You can leverage facebook's expertise, huge takeup, and wide-ranging features.

And although my university will outlive facebook, I don't think a community space set up by the library would do. I hope this doesn't sound horribly negative, it's meant to be positive. You don't need to create a mini-facebook - use their API to create some interesting things that use facebook's platform and you'll get users :)

Cheers!
James

James, thanks. You make many good points, especially regarding the ability, on external sites such as Facebook, to connect to users on other campuses. And of course the feature set of any software is extremely important. I'm still not willing to let go of this idea, however. I'm stubborn! :)

I think there's a place for on-campus communities. These spaces would not be identical to what we have now on external sites. But who knows what they might offer? No campus (that I know of) has explored this thoroughly. I'm not ready to concede something that hasn't been really tried.

How do you suggest that libraries deal with the preservation issues? Should we just write off all this communication as lost?

Haha, you're right it's an interesting debate and if you're going to be stubborn then I feel myself drawn to play devil's advocate!!

It would take an significant amount of [often scarce] resources to make a small community space work. For it to work you'd have to first reach a kind of critical mass that would allow it to run on autopilot and generate its own new users and content.

You're sure to get some early adopters, but what features would this smaller, slightly different space be able to offer that would make it valuable to students? I just can't see any campus space being able to offer something new or better than what facebook already does.

In terms of the preservation, it sounds like your solution is to draw students away from facebook (no preservation) to a local place where there would be efforts of preservation. But what exactly do you want to preserve? I've used facebook for three years and I will want to keep access to my photos.. and that's probably about it. The correspondence I've had is insignificant. How about setting up something, using facebook's API, that would allow you to "archive" certain bits of correspondence/actions that would be saved on the library's disks? Or get in touch with facebook and find out if they're already thinking about something similar?

Finally, how long would one of these spaces take to set up? By the time you have it ready the technology and the users may have moved on. Even if you're going to use ning/elgg, then you're asking students to learn to use a whole new social networking space.. when they've already got one that does the job.

Fascinating stuff!
James

I was so excited to read this post. From a student persective (as a current MLS student in a distance program), I see a huge need for social communities sponsored by colleges & universities - that already spend huge amounts of time and money on social activities for students in the physical realm (so why not the virtual). In many programs, distance students have no way to connect with their fellow distance students - and this is a huge drawback to distance education. Whenever I have asked about university sponsored space, the answer has been use Yahoo Groups, Google Groups, Facebook, Ning, etc. I think many of these sites have incredible value, but they are hosted outside of the school - and many, many, many people don't want to join these external sites where they have to have specific email addresses. Additionally, it would be helpful to get real information about school-related items. Disparate groups created on external social networking sites work great for more global groups (and I'm not discounting the fact that there are many local groups on Facebook), but that doesn't help me connect with students, staff and faculty at the school I am currently attending.

James, My stubbornness is inspiring your stubbornness which, in turn, is really getting my ginger up. ha!

I'm reading Jennifer's comment just above. There's an example of a current student who is interested. I think she makes the good point that the type of community space hosted on campus would be different from an external one. There just might be a need it would fulfill. She also provides an insight that hadn't occurred to me - that many students prefer not to join external communities. I've been more concerned about students prefering not to join campus-sponsored communities. Very interesting.

I like your idea of possibly using Facebook's API for preservation. I hadn't thought of this. But Facebook is just one of many possible sites that host interactions relevant to my campus community.

I'm also interested in this idea as part of my larger view of social scholarship. Integrating all kinds of social tools on campus would be an amazing feat. I wonder if a campus Web site might ultimately give way to such a thing? If done very well? I can't resist raising the stakes!

I might be tilting at windmills - or maybe not.

Laura, I would rather my comments not be seen as dark. A worthwhile project needs firm requirements to tell when you are done, I suggested a couple of the requirements or goals that a successful program would need to address. Particularly the availability of people to nurture the product as a community grows around it.

I also noted Jennifer's excitement. I think getting a useful format going on a day's notice, or even in a week, would be optimistic. But an ongoing system of student blogs, diaries, showcases of hobbies and pictures, community bulletin boards, etc., should be ready to encompass significant events.

Please, just don't distract students (more) from getting their studying done .. lol!

Aha, now you really have raised the stakes. Ever the optimist! I agree that a campus website with social features built right into the heart of it would be quite a thing. A very useful thing indeed, in fact.

However.. rather depressingly.. it's just not going to happen. There may be one or two campus websites in the USA that manage to do it, but I can tell you with 99% certainty that it won't happen in the UK. It would just take too much effort and too much argument from a too-small minority of advocates. Technology will have moved swiftly on in the 5+ years it would take to implement the kind of things we can imagine in 2007.

So let's stick to the realistic (!) and see what we can do for Jennifer (Hi Jennifer) and others in a similar position. Perhaps I should concede that I've been too flattering to facebook and others - they don't provide everything. However, it seems to me that it would be better to improve what facebook does than start from scratch. Quicker, easier, and building on top of an already successful and much-used platform.

Surely any social network requires giving a specific email address to sign up. That would happen if it were internal or external. So I don't really see that as an argument?

Here's three things you could do quickly for facebook specifically, but you could come up with tens more if you got some clever people together
- get loads more staff on facebook
- brainstorm ideas about using it to communicate with current students
- understand how you can use it to communicate with prospective students specifically (again you could do some fantastic things here with the facebook API)
- get some plain english details about facebook for prospective students and staff on the campus website.

I know what you mean about multiple sites and the problem of preserving across them all. Again, however, I'm still not sure what you want to preserve?

Leaving work now (18.16hrs) so will comment again tomorrow if the discussion continues!!

Cheers
James

This is a great discussion! I thought that I would give a bit of background on my particular situation. As a distance student, I have found that I am incredibly disconnected from campus - and from my fellow distance students. As a result, I have tried to create several, virtual, social spaces for students in my MLS program - on Ning, Yahoo, Google, the SCSU campus portal, and Facebook. So far, the Facebook group has gotten the largest response. The problem? I created it as a local group on the southern connecticut network - and at this point, only people with a school email can join. Many students don't use their school email (even though they have one). Several students wanted to join, but couldn't. Many others voiced the opinion that their kids might not want them on Facebook - and as such, wouldn't join.

Some students who already had Yahoo and Gmail emails joined the Yahoo and Google groups - and no one joined the Ning group. I thought Ning might work better because any email address could join. However, most of the students hadn't heard of it. Creating social space is tough - and time consuming. All of the students that I was in contact with thought it important that we have some type of social space and really would have liked it to be officially sponsored by the school. It is worth noting that very few of them actually joined any of the networks that I created.

So, this is what I meant by the problem of specific email addresses. And yes, you are right that it would be a problem whether sites were internal or external. However, if a space were to be set up internally, a school (and a site creator) knows that ALL of the students could join if so inclined. Additionally, if school's offer specific email addresses to alums, then alumni could be part of the network also.

Other issues with external spaces:
One student ususally creates is - and is the owner. Once the student graduates, the site often whithers away. The next generation has to recreate the site again. In Yahoo, I have seen several groups created for the same purpose, just several years apart. This would work best if a staff person at the school actually owned the site and appointed a student overseer.

Permissions - If the groups are open to everyone (non-Facebook sites), SPAMmers abound. If groups are restricted, people have to be invited - and they can be difficult for people to actually find. This is a great deal of work for the administrator.

Security - Many students didn't want to join a site that was publicly available and searchable. They preferred that any site created be closed to just students in the program - with a way to be sure that faculty were not monitoring it. This isn't easy to do. However, most schools have all of this information - have groups already in existence. It seems it would be easiest to leverage information from student databases to create secure sites (and permissions).

James, I think that you provided some great starting points. I honestly think that this isn't something that is even on the radar at most schools. However, I know that it would seriously enrich my academic experience.

Brad, Thanks for your clarification. I do take your very good point.

As I noted in one of my responses to James, I'm also interested in the use of social networks for social scholarship. So I would expect that an online community would provide a forum not only for the pursuit of, well, socializing (and all that distraction from studying!), but also for the pursuit of the social aspects of scholarship. Just as with blogging, there are personal blogs and professional ones. I suspect that you and I are more interested in fostering the scholarly use of social tools!

But I go back to my librarian's interest in preservation across the board. I was actually on the archives track in library school, and some habits of thought hang on! But there is no question, just as you explain, that there would be great challenges to the scenario I suggest.

James, as for you...!

I need to learn about the Facebook API. And as luck would have it, I just got the March issue of Information Technology and Libraries, which includes the article "Checking Out Facebook.com: The Impact of a Digital Trend on Academic Libraries." It includes a survey of 126 academic librarians in the U.S. I'll have to give it a careful read. I did notice, as I skimmed through it, that 54% of the respondants found no "conceivable academic value in Facebook" and 34% were not sure. It isn't only the UK that may have trouble conceptualizing the relevance of social computing to academic librarianship.

I have no problem with being "realistic" - in the short term! If nothing else, a blog is a good place to explore futuristic ideas, however farfetched they might seem today.

Jennifer, your experiences with setting up communities is very telling. Maybe one of the challenges for academia is conceptualizing what a campus-hosted community might provide that would attract members and be workable in the long run. I think you're giving us a good foundation. You could write a position paper on this!

I agree with James and Brad that there are many challenges to overcome - or too many, in James' case - if such a thing were to be routinely implemented on campuses. As with any server-based software, I'm always dreaming of the free (or inexpensive), easy-to-administer, feature-rich, secure, robust, scalable product. That's the idealist in me.

I'm not sure that universities shouldn't abdicate community spaces to larger social networking communities.

Laura, you seem to allude to the need for personal and professional separation of some sort - and I don't think students see the need. (I'm not sure I see the need, either.)

The social networks I tend to invest my time in are ones that allow me to do "one stop shopping." For example, I have been blogging on LiveJournal for nearly 6 years. I've found it's a good way to keep up with friends from high school, college, grad school, and elsewhere, but I also belong to many communities on that site - communities about everything from librarianship to knitting to the city in which I live. I'm spending more time on Facebook lately because I'm finding similar benefits and similar breadth.

Social networks owned or operated by colleges and universities cannot, by nature, have that kind of scope. I'm not saying that's a bad thing; I do think social networks owned/operated by academic institutions have a place (especially in situations like Jennifer describes).

But time and attention are finite commodities, and I think people are more likely to invest their time on a site like Facebook that can be used for many purposes. We prefer, I think, to use such "social aggregators" for the same reasons we prefer to use RSS.

Rikhei, You make good points about the aggregated nature of social sites. At this point, we don't yet know what kind of interoperability among social software systems might develop over the years. And we don't know about the longevity of the social sites that are now popular, though it's obvious that their demise will come much sooner than the demise of our institutions! It's still very early in the game.

You've been blogging for such a long time. Impressive!

Hi Laura, I have only just started reading your blog, but this entry is great! It has started to describe ideas I have been forming in my head regarding the use of social networking tools to form communities and bring people together. I am a recent graduate and new librarian but I am really excited about the possibilities that are on offer to add value to library and information services. I believe there is a lot of untapped potential in emerging technologies that libraries can use to increase customer service and deliver information. I have just started working in a state library in Australia, so I am still surveying the culture and existing attitudes about library 2.0 over here. This may sound idealistic and fresh-faced, but I really hope I can make a difference!

Sharon, our profession needs new librarians like you - excited about the possibilites and optimistic about their role in the future of our profession. Best of luck!

Laura and all,
I'm joining this conversation way too late, but wanted to be sure that you knew about the April 16 Archive http://www.april16archive.org/ that VA Tech launched by April 24 by my colleagues and I at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason. Because of the outpouring via Facebook, we were contacted by Center for Digital Discourse and Culture to help them create a central database/website to archive digital and submitted material all relating to the tragedies on April 16 for the university.

Facebook has a place, and we have been thinking how we can save what is created in a Facebook or MySpace environment because it's more than manipulating an API. There are proprietary issues with those tools, and we also must deal with various levels of permissions established by individual network participants, group moderators, et al.

This was a great post that generated excellent commentary. I'm glad I was pointed to your blog!

Shelia, Thank you so much for telling me about the April 16 Archive. I was unaware of this. I would be very interested in learning about any solution you come up with regarding the archiving of material in Facebook, MySpace or similar sites. I'm heartened to know what you're wrestling with these issues. This is important work. Best of luck!