Authors:
Hou Ieong Ho
1
and
Jieh Hsiang
2
Affiliations:
1
Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, Taiwan
;
2
National Taiwan University, Taiwan
Keyword(s):
Social network, Library users, Quantitative analysis, Library services.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Artificial Intelligence
;
Communication, Collaboration and Information Sharing
;
Knowledge Management and Information Sharing
;
Knowledge-Based Systems
;
Social Networks and the Psychological Dimension
;
Symbolic Systems
Abstract:
As social networking becoming commonplace among the young patrons of the libraries, many libraries are incorporating their services into existing social networking environments. However, there have not been many studies on the effectiveness of such services. In this paper, we describe how the National University Library utilizes two social networking platforms, Facebook and Plurk, to provide better services to its webized community. The effectiveness of these services is demonstrated through a quantitative analysis. Different behaviour due to the different propagation mechanisms of Facebook and Plurk is also discussed. Our results indicate that certain library services using social networking services are easy to build, easy to maintain, easy to analyze, and are effective for reaching out to webized patrons.