Sharing Privacy and Trust in Our Networked World

Social networking finally hit the mainstream in 2007, as millions of people signed up to MySpace, Facebook and Bebo. Such networks require users to put a great deal of private information in the public domain. What are the risks in doing this? And can libraries adopt social networking for the benefit of their users?

The first part of this book, published by the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC), reports on an international survey into internet use and the attitudes of both public and professional librarians to sharing personal information online. The second part reports on focus group research that explores these issues in greater depth.

The book is a surprisingly good read. It is well written, clearly and attractively laid out, and the survey results are easy to pick out. The results illustrate how quickly and completely the internet has changed our lives: 89% of respondents have been using the internet for at least four years; 34% of UK respondents have used a social media site; 71% of French respondents have used instant messaging.

As older people become more web-savvy, the book says, the line between “digital natives” and “digital immigrants” is blurring: even the over-50s are quite comfortable using Amazon and YouTube.

Librarians, it turns out, have been using the internet for longer than the general public, and they continue to use it more intensively.

“They may well be the digital pioneers of the Internet Age,” the authors suggest. Librarians are also more wary of sharing their personal information on social networking sites, and more concerned about the lack of privacy in online communication.

When it comes to how libraries can make best use of Web 2.0 technology, the book provides some innovative examples. Ann Arbor District Library, in Michigan, for example, allows users to make comments, post blog entries and sign up for RSS feeds on its website.

On the British Library website, a video presented by Tim Campbell (winner of reality TV show The Apprentice) offers a virtual tour of the library.

Even so, the authors believe that librarians are “lagging, not leading” in their use of social networking tools. They conclude with a call to action: “Open the library doors, invite mass participation by users and relax the rules of privacy.”

Libraries ­ and their users ­ might not yet be ready for such a dramatic reversal. But given the current pace of change, we may not have to wait for very long for precisely this to happen.

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