“If you could contact a librarian via Facebook or MySpace for help with your research, would you? If not, why?”
That was the question asked of 300+ college students in a recent University of Michigan Library survey. See the results on the right.
According to Suzanne Chapman at UM:
The main impetus for this question comes from a current trend for libraries to create Facebook apps that allow OPAC searching and other library related functionality from within Facebook. There has also been a lot of discussion and experimentation with using Facebook for reference and outreach.
Thanks to Leah Ujda over at the UW Digital Collections Center for forwarding this to me. We’d just been discussing this question last week at our semi-annual UW Madison Libraries Reference Retreat. Good to have some data to consult.