Facebook as a Library Tool: Perceived vs. Actual Use

Terra B. Jacobson is Public Services Manager in the Library at Prairie State College; e-mail: Terra.jacobson@ gmail.com. The author would like to thank Dr. Noriko Hara for all of her assistance and guidance with this paper. © Terra B. Jacobson As Facebook has come to dominate the social networking site arena, more libraries have created their own library pages on Facebook to create library awareness and to function as a marketing tool. This paper examines reported versus actual use of Facebook in libraries to identify discrepancies between intended goals and actual use. The results of a 2009 study about the use of Facebook in libraries are used as a guide to gauge the perceived and actual uses for Facebook in this study. Results of the test reveal that the two ranks are not statistically different, but that there is a noticeable difference when looking at the perceived and actual rankings qualitatively.