Facebook and Libraries

Finally! Something I don't have to sign up to!!
As is my way, I was a late convert to Facebook, having dismissed it as intrusive and banal for quite some time. In the end I joined on the back of a number of discoveries, not least that my 70-year-old father uses it to communicate with his chums in the Poker community and also that I needed it in order to find out the movements of the Oxford Part-Time Learners Group. Having joined I found myself in touch with various disparate people from my landlord to friends from school to my more recent fellow-students at Aberystwyth University, and so I began to appreciate the value of this type of networking-resource.
The trouble with libraries is that their content has always, until recently at least, been pretty static and not particularly obvious from anywhere but within the library itself. Facilities such as Facebook, blogs and other Web 2.0 applications give libraries the opportunity to inform their readers and potential readers what they are doing, when there are events which might be of interest to the wider community, and also to highlight aspects of their collections which might otherwise not be widely publicised.
The News Feed on Facebook is invaluable as a way of sneaking in information to users/fans/members (although I do get a little tired of other people's horoscopes), which requires no effort on the part of the people who are signed up for updates, unlike for example Google Reader (mine is showing over 450 unread items at present...).
In a setting such as Oxford University, where many of the users of the libraries are young and have grown up used to using the Web as a tool far more than those of an earlier generation, these sites will already be an integral part of their lives and therefore ripe for exploitation by forward-thinking librarians.
And as for the older generation, it does not pay to underestimate their involvement either; when my new Bodleian email failed to work yesterday, my Mum sent me a message on Facebook... :)