Thing 4: Social Networking

I have an account at Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Mostly, I set them up to maintain contact with friends and co-workers but I realized I could not keep up with all four. So I mainly use Facebook for purely social contacts and I keep LinkedIn to add contacts with people I either have worked for or with in the past. I thoroughly enjoy my Facebook account because I have definitely found another side of my colleagues that I would not ordinarily know - their family, interests, etc. I also use it to keep up with some of my friends in genealogy and we all use Facebook rather than the online forums because we can post pictures. But I also enjoy re-establishing contacts with my old high school friends, many of whom I have not seen for ages. And I have made contact with a number of former high school students whom I taught when I was employed as an English teacher in Shenandoah County.

If I were to pick one of the social networks to use to set up a library presence, I think I would use Facebook. Most of our students seem to use Facebook more often to communicate. Lord Fairfax already has several departments with a Facebook page and I am envious. I would like to be able to announce new books, display photos of various areas and students, and promote events there. Maybe one of these days!

Thing 3: RSS Feeds

I have already started subscribing to RSS feeds using Outlook at work but I did also start an account at Google Reader just to see what it is like. I think I prefer Outlook's setup because it looks far less cluttered and is easy to access, but that may just be me.

On Outlook, I have subscribed to RSS feeds for Lord Fairfax Community College's New Jobs postings and for VIVA General Announcements. The new jobs postings are always interesting, esp. since I do not always realize someone is leaving his/her post or a new position has been created. Since I work with interlibrary loans, I subscribed to the VIVA RSS feed for that agency.

But for Reader I added

1) the general LFCC news feed, just to keep up with what is being posted to the public abt. LFCC

2) This Day in Virginia History because second to English, History (esp. Virginia History) is my second love.

3) Virginiana for the same reason above

4) the VCCS Online Library on Twitter (for obvious reasons, plus it does have very good information that I am interested in as a reader and lover of libraries)

5) the Library of Congress RSS feed (again for obvious reasons).

It was not exactly hard to find feeds for things in which I am interested - in fact, there are almost too many and it was hard to choose! I have seen more and more sites making RSS updates available and it is tempting to subscribe to them all. But then I will run into the same problem I run into with my listservs - I have no time to look at all of them, so I have to pick and choose.

I may go back at some point, look at what I have chosen, and either delete some and add others or just start over again. But for the purposes of this project, I have learned how to set up Google Reader and have seen its plus and minuses. So this has been a good lesson all around!