Sit up and face forward
Last week I aired my doubts about libraries stepping into the Facebook frey. A marginal (position, not quality) note about the service from our parents’ newsletter :
Facebook.com has become a phenomenon on college campuses nationwide. With self-authored profiles of tens of thousands of students, the site is a repository of personal information and photographs. Talk to your student about his or her profile and the potential consequences associated with making personal information available on the World Wide Web.
I think the the tone is clear - this is not seen as an academic resource by the parents association - in fact it sounds highly suspicious of the service. I am one of the last people to take cues from this type of group about what’s appropriate and what’s not, but it does make me pause a bit more. A university and its library depends upon establishing credibility in parents’ eyes just as much as in students’, so does a Facebook presence potentially compromise our credibility as an academic authority? Or does it help to establish Facebook’s? It’s a thin line… one that I’m tempting to draw somewhere between chat via popular services-casual blogging-flickr and Facebook.
