Loved this image but then was quite a smurf fan when little! Thanks to 99zeros via FlickrCC. Anyway to LinkedIn which I knew little about though had come across when working on NACO authority proposals for my Legal Deposit Libraries Shared Cataloguing. Can be quite useful for this! LinkedIn seems to me to some extent the other extreme from facebook. It has a much more professional/business feel and outlook. Profiles can look quite like CVs and I believe the site has been used for looking for jobs, conference speakers, etc. Libraries, however, need to question at least 2 things 1) Are their users here - for somewhere like CUL which operates as a Research Library for academics and not primarily as a lending library for undergraduates they may well be. 2) Do our users who are here expect to find us here? - do they associate libraries with business? If a library is participating in LinkedIn this would probably need to be advertised via other means -RSS feed on web page for example. Haven't spent as much time looking at this as I would like but think there might be potential for making contact with publishers, electronic journal providers etc. - finding out about what they offer, which new ones exist, keeping up to date with new technological innovations through a professional network and indeed expressing our own needs.
I think Linkedin works best (at least for me) as a way of making and maintaining professional contacts outside Cambridge, and keeping in touch with developments via Newsgroups.
ReplyDeleteLoving the Smurfs!
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