Application of social networking tools in academic libraries

An attempt has been made in this paper to discuss current environment of social networking. The paper provides brief introduction about social networking tools in academic libraries. Social Networking is frequently accessed by teacher and students as a communication tool. The Social Networking Sites are linked with Web and that's why young generation are heavy users of social networking. The ease of usage of these feature rich social networks fuelled by the ever increasing availability of low cost and fast internet has increased usage. The advantage of this application is that students, lecturers and researcher can exchange their value based ideas. The popularity of social network has come with initiative given by college students using the services to network with professionals for internship and job opportunities. In today's scenario, all social networks have become almost mirror images of each other in terms of features provided as well as the user interfaces that are being provided. Universities library website homepage has been linked to facebook, twitter, flicker and other social network. Even the library of congress (LC) has acknowledged the cultural significance of social networking with its announcement that Twitter has donated its entire tweet archive to the Library. It concludes with the opinion that use of social networking tools like blog, RSS, social bookmarking, wikis by libraries is increasing.