SLIS alumna Terra Jacobson (MIS/MLS'09) has been accepted for future publication in journal of the Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL). Her paper is titled “Facebook as a Library Tool: Perceived v. Actual Use” and is set to be published in the January 2011 issue of College & Research Libraries. Terra’s paper was originally written for a class she took with SLIS faculty member Noriko Hara.
Dr. Hara commented in an email interview:
• "One of the former SLIS students, Terra Jacobson, just published a paper in the journal College and Research Libraries. The paper was originally written for my courses [SLIS S518: Communication in Electronic Environments]. Her final paper was about comparing the perceived use and actual use of Facebook in academic libraries. It is one of the core ideas in Social Informatics (Terra took my other courses as well). She incorporated my feedback and made the paper publishable. I had recommended that she should pursue the possibility of publishing the paper, but she is the one who went through the submission process. I'm very happy for her."
Below is an excerpt from the preprint, now available on the ACRL website:
• “Libraries, in the past few years, have begun to examine the possibilities available to them through social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook as a tool for library awareness and marketing. As Facebook has come to dominate the social networking site arena, more libraries have created their own library pages on Facebook to create library awareness and to function as a marketing tool. This has spurred a large amount of how-to articles about the uses for Facebook in libraries as well as research about how librarians and libraries use Facebook. This paper examines reported versus actual use of Facebook in libraries to identify discrepancies between intended goals and actual use. The results of the 2009 study by Hendrix, Chiarella, Hasman, Murphy and Zafron, about the use of Facebook in libraries, is used as a guide to gauge the perceived and actual uses for Facebook in this study.”
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Posted March 09, 2010