I have a confession. I loathe Facebook with a passionate hate I reserve for dog fighting enthusiasts and James Van Der Beek. But, hey, this is Learning 2.0, and these are tools that, theoretically, can help us get information in the hands of our patrons. I'm willing to put my burning disdain on the shelf for a moment and try these suckers out.
Let's begin with PubFace.
Simple search bar, nothing fancy. Right off the bat, the query limit worries me. The complete warning next to "Fetch Max" reads "Don't be greedy - your search might time out and you won't get anything".Phbbt. Whatever. Let's kick it up to 50 and see what happens. I'm going to search for articles about... Hmmm. How about the "reanimation of dead tissue"?
Wizard. Let's see what we got. We have full article titles, authors' names, PMID numbers, full cite, and links to the abstracts, article links, and a couple of other options. "Send to a friend" lets me send the information directly to anyone in of the folks I have in my trusty "Friends" box. "Add to MyLibrary" puts the information into a PubFace specific database, a kind of bookmarking within your FaceBook page.Next, let's try PubMed Search.
Looks very official like. No query limit, though. I'll try the same search I did previously.
Looks like the same situation as PubFace, though with less information in the results. Adding to Favorites works the same as MyLibrary, and the Share button will let you send the article to your "Friends" as well as your entire friends list, an email address, or directly to your profile. That's a tad more functionality than PubFace offers.Not bad. If I were running a page for Becker, were a reference librarian with a bunch of students or faculty linked up to my profile, or even just more of a power user of the thing, being able to shoot an article to them directly from Facebook would be kinda handy. The "Add" function serves the same kind of purpose as Del.icio.us, but, while not particular cup of tea, it's still a great tool for the person who lives on the service.
That's probably what taints the applications for me. It's made for a very specific type of user. While both would probably be good tools for study groups or even class groups put together on the Facebook service, as far as general library use is concerned, I'm not sure this fits. Maybe if we had a specific librarian that ran all of our Web 2.0 stuff? I don't know...
Either way, the tools are out there to be played with. Maybe someone with a little less bile and venom for Facebook can think of better ways to use the applications.
(found via David Rothman)
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