Thanks to the 47 library folks who have responded to earlier requests. I’d love to have a few more responses by September 14, 2011, along the following lines:
Basic Information
Library/district official name
State, province or country
Service area population
Your name, title and email address
Whether you’re willing to have your comments used as direct quotations or only as background.Comments on Twitter or Facebook (or both—indicate which):
Whatever you feel is worth saying about how your library uses the social network, how much time is spent preparing items and responding to items (if you do that), whether one person or many post, the feedback you’ve gotten from your patrons, whether it seems worthwhile—and whatever else you think is worth mentioning.
Comments on the relationship between the two (if you use both):
Do you use them for different purposes, or are Facebook statuses basically longer versions of tweets (or maybe the same)? Other comments on the differences and similarities as your library has used them?
Thanks!
I can’t guarantee your comments will be used—I’d expect that no more than 2,000-3,000 words of the book will be comments from these emails. I will list you in the acknowledgments (unless you ask me not to do so) and your comments will definitely help as I prepare the subjective portions of the book.
Please email comments to waltcrawford at gmail.com
If your library stopped using either or both (yes, I have at least one such response), I’d be interested in knowing that as well–and why.
The checked states
Responses are invited from people in one of the 25 states where I’ve checked websites of libraries (“libraries” as defined by the state’s own statistical reports)–a little over 2,400 in all, not the 2,500 I estimated in earlier comments–and also from those in other states, provinces and nations.
Here are the states I’ve checked:
California, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Minnesota, New Jersey, Arizona, Washington, Maryland, Missouri, Colorado, Louisiana, South Carolina, Kentucky, Oregon, Connecticut, Mississippi, Utah, Nevada, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Idaho, Montana, Alaska, Wyoming.
Libraries in those states have defined primary service area populations totaling 163,657,750 based on the most recent state reports (2009 in most cases)–a little more than half the nation’s total, albeit a lot less than half of the public libraries.(There are hundreds of small and rural libraries in this sample–174 libraries serving fewer than 1,000 people and 639 in all serving fewer than 5,000.)
[The states are in descending order by total of the PSA populations. That’s not always the same as the state’s total population, for various reasons, and in one or two cases is distinctly larger due to reporting oddities, which will not be dealt with in this project.]
Anyway: More responses welcome, and thanks again to those who have responded so far.
