Academic libraries tend to focus on the needs of faculty and students, and the Facebook pages of the four academic law libraries I’m in the process of examining follow those aims with different levels of success. From the four examples I list below, it seems that academic law libraries on tend to use the same formula: information about the university, about the library (library hours, etc.), about what the faculty and students are doing, and what legal materials might help.
Attempting to find the Facebook page for the Dr. Lillian & Dr. Rebecca Chutick Law Library (a.k.a., the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law Library) was a bit like pulling my own teeth until I thought, “Perhaps I should check their catalogue page.” Once I did that, the link to the Facebook page was easy to find. (On the left-hand side under the Law Library heading.) Still, not terribly intuitive. Instead, the library’s “homepage” was indistinguishable from the University’s overall page scheme; without any measure of separation, the result is an absolute muddle. That’s a pity, because once you get to the Bibliographic and Electronic Network (i.e., catalogue) page, it’s so easy to find what you want.
Digging into the Facebook page (second link in the paragraph above), it’s fairly conventional but presents a decent amount of material dealing with the law school, legal (and other) resources (for instance, the EU Bookshop), and information regarding the library itself, all of which would be fairly useful if I was a student there. Pity it took a while to find it.
By contrast, finding the Facebook page for the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law Library is wonderfully painless: as long as you know what you’re looking for (i.e., the little Facebook icon), just click on it and you’re there. A link to the Facebook page is also available under the Quick Links header on the left-hand side of the page. Redundancy with clarity, I love it. Pleasant looking homepage, too.
The page itself isn’t terribly exciting (which isn’t to say it isn’t informative), although the Electronic Services Librarian is certainly keeping up on the free and/or useful legal resources and interesting stories front. Judging by her blog entry on Xyggy, she vets material pretty thoroughly and provides an honest, considered opinion on the blog.
On the oddities front, she included the case of a prisoner who sued Thanksgiving, among several other things (and people). Interesting, informative, and downright ridiculous. You have to admire the craziness of a prisoner who demands $100 million for damages against defendants that (to quote the decision):
“appear to be various private food companies, a baseball team, a holiday, and the day after Thanksgiving. To the extent any of these defendants are actual entities that may be sued, they are private organizations that do not act under color of state law, an essential element of a § 1983 action.”
Amazing, although it’s a pity I can’t find out exactly what a section 1983 action is because hyperlink (which I removed) links to Westlaw. Still, you have to laugh.
UBC Law Library’s Facebook page is also quite easy to find from the homepage; the link is right under the library name, as is that to the blog and Twitter feed. (Note on the homepage: It’s hideous, I know. Most homepages conforming to the UBC standard format tend to be unbelievably dreadful, undoubtedly to the chagrin of those poor devils tasked with updating them.) To a significant extent, the three social media form less of a triptych than a triplicate, but since not everyone is comfortable with all three services — despite Stephen Fry’s twillionaire status, the allure of Twitter still befuddles me (early days yet) — better to reproduce the information than to create an information gap. The Facebook page covers changes in library policy (extended hours and other events), additions to the electronic resources and links to blog postings announcing new books, as well as law faculty mentions in the media (UBC Reports, etc.). It isn’t exactly page-turning material, but Facebook isn’t all Terry Pratchett now, is it?
On to number four on the list: the University of Windsor’s Paul Martin Law Library. Dear sainted supernatural being, the homepage is a nightmare that ought to be broken up into a number of subsidiary pages. Hasn’t Wikipedia shown us the way? Yes? No? Anyway, forwards I trudge …
So, the Facebook page, where to find it. Nowhere. Maybe I’m as blind as a mole wearing one of those sleep masks at the bottom of an abyss, but I can’t find any link to it. Anywhere. Even using the search function on the page. Oh, certainly, I can find the occasional mention of it, but actually finding it without actually going on to Facebook? Silly me. (RSS feeds and whatnot and other news feeds can be found by clicking on News Feeds on the upper right-hand-side of the page. Maybe the youth of today can figure out that sort of thing, but me, I like it obvious and painfully direct.)
Searching on Facebook, I finally come up with the Paul Martin Law Library’s page. It hasn’t been updated since late September (28 September, to be precise). Unlike the Facebook pages of the other three academic law libraries, which are updated frequently, that of the Paul Martin Law Library is barely used and is consequently of little use, let’s be honest, no use whatsoever. This lack of utility is demonstrated by the distinct absence of fans to the site — only 18 to the hundreds who subscribe to any one of the other three — which makes me wonder what exactly the library was doing establishing a Facebook presence if it wasn’t going to use it.
Of the four Facebook presences examined here, Cleveland-Marshall’s Law Library crosses the line with a good lead with findability and general utility (with a headstart from the elegant library homepage); the UBC Law Library comes up second as it is easily found, is updated frequently, and has decent information; the Dr. Lillian and Dr. Rebecca Chutick Law Library (Benjamin N. Cardozo) comes up a distant third because though it’s updated frequently enough and it has many fans, it’s a pain to find from the Library’s homepage (unless you consider the OPAC the homepage); and having died before leaving the gate, it’s the University of Windsor’s Paul Martin Law Library (och lad, we hardly knew ye … ).
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