Resource Review #7

http://www.emeraldinsight.com.ezproxy.library.wisc.edu/Insight/viewContentItem.do;jsessionid=971F022807CC06267FB83BF32FE29FC3?contentType=Article&contentId=1805540

This article, "Reference utility of social networking sites: options and functionality" by Heidi Steiner form the journal Library Hi Tech News, analyzes four social networking sites -- Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and Ning -- with regard to their usefulness as library reference tools. Steiner finds that "Facebook provides the most promise and possibility as a reference utility." But she also notes that Twitter has a great deal of reference potential, primarily because of its simplicity in comparison to many other social networking sites.

I like this article because it analyzes Twitter in the context of other social networking sites, and it focuses solely on one library function, reference, rather than listing many different ways in which Twitter could be or is being used in libraries. I'm not sure I agree with the conclusion that Facebook has the most potential for reference use. To my mind, Facebook is much more about creating and viewing profiles, while Twitter's text-based approach seems to lend itself more to asking and answering questions. Steiner does mention the usefulness of the Facebook chat feature, but I think Twitter can also function essentially as a chat service as long as a librarian is logged in, monitoring the feed, and ready to answer questions as soon as they are tweeted.

This article, like at least one of my other resources, also mentions the privacy concerns that arise with using Twitter for reference. Tweets are available for anyone who has a Twitter account to see -- the question is, as Steiner puts it, "should reference questions and answers be available for all to read?" While many library users might not mind, certainly not all would want their references questions and answers to be quite so public. Steiner also points out that the 140-character limit for Tweets is too short to answer more complex reference questions. I think both of these are important issues that librarians need to keep in mind if they do choose to use Twitter for reference purposes.