It's not you, I just need MySpace

Oh, MySpace. If we kept stats on that sort of thing, I've little doubt it would be the most visited site on my library's public internet computers. After school, we should just hang out a "MySpace Cafe" sign and forget about that whole book thing.

I have a couple of favorite MySpace stories. The first happened several months ago, when I was trying to help a young patron with a misbehaving computer. He just gave me a withering look and said, "This is MySpace. You don't know anything about this." The latest happened this past week when we found it necessary to ban three young men from our hallowed halls for an extended period of time. They use our 'brary in the evening and on Saturdays, when we have fewer staff on duty, so some of my comrades were not sure they knew who the guys were. I found one of them on MySpace, and got to the other two's profiles because they were Friends of the one I could find. I snagged their pictures, printed them out on our color printer, and now feel confident that they won't be able to sneak in when someone they don't recognize is working.

I felt like a latter-day Nancy Drew. Kinda clever, if I do say so myself, although probably not what the Project Play folks had in mind for libraries using MySpace.

But anyway. Generally speaking, MySpace just gives me a headache. All the backgrounds and the page elements make for very difficult viewing. It just screams bad design to me. Something else I thought was not so cool was one library's page that had lots of comments from what appeared to be patrons (good thing), but a lot of the comments were just stupid (Thanks for the add, Jessie! Thanx 4 wishing me a happy b-day luv ya and hope 2 c u today), and one frequent poster goes by the name Shithead. Call me a grumpy old librarian, but I don't find that things like that really add anything useful or positive to that library's web presence. Of course, this isn't confined to MySpace. Any site where people can post comments gets cluttered with stupidity. I can't read the news online without wading through loads of comments that are just dumb, ignorant, and (worst of all) ungrammatical. I should just stop reading the comments, but sometimes there are good insights there underneath all the garbage. Someone should invent a "dumb comment filter" for Web 2.0 applications. I could get behind that.

I digress. I liked the screen shots from Facebook much better, though I haven't created an account there yet. Maybe later. The layouts just seemed crisper, less distracting, more useful and navigable.

While I do buy into the notion of meeting our users where they are (and Lord knows they are on MySpace), I just can't get excited about my library having a presence there. We have users and potential users in Home Depot too, but we don't set up a satellite branch there (next to the hot dog stand in the entrance) with books from our home improvement collection. We don't set up a table at the hip-hop club to let people know we have hip-hop CDs at the library.

We're all trying to do more with less, and I don't think that having a MySpace page is something a library should necessarily do unless it can do it well.That's not to say that a younger generation of librarians won't be able to do it right, but not this curmudgeon. Is there anything more horrifying than a middle-aged mom trying to dress and sound like her teenage daughter and not quite getting it right?

Shudder.

Besides, I kind of like them to think I don't know anything about what they're doing. Mwahahaaaaaa.....