Abstract:
Social media has revolutionized means and modes of communication and has
created a new information culture: As such social media has to be integrated
in promoting library services and resources of the university libraries. An
attempt to explore the usage of social media by university libraries was
undertaken.
The objectives of the study were to explore usage of social networking tools,
with special reference to Facebook in University libraries. Other objectives
were to investigate the academic librarians' attitudes towards the usefulness
of Facebook as a social media networking tool, and to explore the problems
related to using Facebook as a library promotional tool. This study had used
both quantitative and qualitative research methods. Data collection was
mainly from a questionnaire, and subsequently by observation of library
Facebook sites. All 19 national university libraries were taken as the study
population.
Two libraries had already created Facebook fan pages, while another site
had not been officially accepted. The two officially accepted Facebook pages
were observed under the following criteria: date of establishment, number of
fans, information shared, services offered, and the activities promoted.
All librarians considered Facebook to be either important (66.7) or very
important (33.3%) in promoting library resources and services.
This study depicts that university librarian s attitudes were positive in using
FB for the promotion of library resources and services. Those university
librarians strongly believe that social media including the FB is an important
tool for marketing of library products and services. They have realized thatit is very useful when they want to commlfnicate with their library clientele
in order to cater to their information needs. This observation is in line with
Graham, Faise & Hartman (2009) too.
