Dean Hendrix, Deborah Chiarella, Linda Hasman, Sharon Murphy, and Michelle L. Zafron wanted to determine institutional Facebook use by academic health sciences libraries and the perceived success of their pages. They designed a survey which was distributed to 144 librarians from member libraries of the Academic Health Sciences Libraries. Half of the librarians answered the survey, while only 12.5% of them reported that their libraries maintained a Facebook page. Facebook was mainly used to market the library, push out announcements to library users, post photos, provide chat reference, and have a presence in the social network. Those who did not use Facebook (85% of the respondents) said it was because of the lack of time to set up and maintain a page, and the belief that Facebook demonstrated little utility in an academic setting.

To learn more read the full version of the “Use of Facebook in academic health sciences libraries” article published in the Journal of the Medical Library Association.