Abstract
Use of Facebook in academic health sciences libraries
Highlights
Founded to link students at Harvard University, the social networking application, Facebook, has evolved into the most visited social networking site in the world with over 90 million active users
Seventy-two librarians responded to the survey, resulting in a 50% response rate (n572/144)
The remaining 2 respondents (3%, n52/72) answered, ‘‘I don’t know.’’ All respondents reported that they were familiar with the brand name, ‘‘Facebook.’’
Summary
Founded to link students at Harvard University, the social networking application, Facebook, has evolved into the most visited social networking site in the world with over 90 million active users. As academic health sciences libraries explore social networking technologies to create and market library services, Facebook provides a flexible space to interface with a large number of students. For health sciences libraries, whose users are often widely dispersed, Facebook offers several opportunities for outreach and instruction. Self-organizing groups of users (i.e., medical student class of 2010, pharmaceutical sciences undergraduates) afford targeted marketing opportunities despite their distributed locations (i.e., teaching hospitals, rural clinics, commercial pharmaceutical laboratories). Facebook encourages developers to create applications that could be useful in a health sciences setting (i.e., PubMed Search application), form affinity groups (i.e., Medical Library Association Facebook group), and fashion library fan pages
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