Following Facebook

Millions of teenagers and I have something in common.  My mother is on Facebook.  I never thought the day would come, and quite frankly I never pushed her because I didn’t think she would be interested.  But my mom joined.  For her it is all one sided.  She is a lurker, she doesn’t say that specifically but she told me she just really joined so she could follow my siblings and I and our cousins in our day to day musings and family photos. 

Facebook is becoming more pervasive and more and more people are joining.  MLA now has an official MLA Facebook pageand a lot of hospitals are using Facebook to do outreach.  If you haven’t noticed it, local news channels are using Facebook as well as other established companies.  On a personal note I have noticed more people finding me on Facebook too….. including my mom.

So I have begun to separate my librarian life from my personal life on Facebook just a little bit more.  Just like email, I now have a professional account and a personal account.  In the following weeks I will be doing more of my professional librarian type stuff on my Facebook Fan Page http://www.facebook.com/KraftyLibrarian. I will also begin to weed my personal page.  I know Scott Plutchak has mentioned a few times that he doesn’t really consider himself to be segmented into a personal life and work life, that they all are a part of his life and make up who he is.  I agree with that, my kids, my husband, my hobbies as well as librarianship all go into making me who I am.  However, I find that for my sanity, it is easier for me to have two somewhat different social networking lives/personas.  My family and close friends (non librarians) are not as interested in PubMed, MeSH, the user experience, NLM, and MLA as I am.  Likewise I am sure there are many librarians who I am friends with who are way more interested in the librarianship stuff rather than my family trip to St. Louis, my kids’ fascination with Guitar Hero songs, and what SciFi movie I just saw.  I kind of look at Facebook as simplified telephone, I am not going to talk about the finer points of searching MEDLINE using both Ovid and PubMed with my brother.  Likewise I am not going to talk about how the 104 degree heat plus a well place pebble on the highway required me to replace the windshield on my brand new car.  That is not to say there won’t be any cross over.  Au contraire, just like Scott said, all these pieces are who I am, and they lend a bit of flavor to the story or message I am trying to convey.  However, the primary topic on those sites will be more specific.

So I want to let everybody know that in the next few weeks my personal Facebook site will no longer be sending out library related news and it will be more personal in nature.  Fair warning I will also be “un-friending” some people.  It is nothing personal, if I do it to you it is just because I thought you were more interested in library stuff rather than how much cooler and bigger the Magic House in St. Louis has gotten since I was a kid.  If you want to still remain on my personal site, drop me a note.  If you would rather follow me professionally, don’t forget to go to my fan page and become a Fan.