Changing landscape of social networking services in Indian libraries

Today, in this modern world, the strongest media for communicating among people is Social Media. We are becoming more and more dependent on Social Media for sharing information (including personal information), data, pictures, watching videos, making shopping, getting news, forwarding messages and so on. Academic Libraries must harness the power of this most powerful media to stay connected with its users and provide information at shortest possible time. Academic Libraries should also facilitate communication among the scholars for sharing the information through this media. This paper presents the usage of social networking sites (SNSs) by the students and faculty for sharing information in universities of Haryana. The study is a questionnaire-based survey on the usage of SNSs among the students and faculty members of the selected universities of Haryana. The data of the study were collected through questionnaires, which were personally distributed to the identified population, i.e. undergraduate and postgraduate students, research scholars and faculty members by the researcher. The survey was based on a sample of 700 questionnaires; of which, 560 questionnaires were received, having a response rate of 80.0 per cent. The study showed that all the respondents were found to be aware of and making use of such applications in their academic affairs. It was revealed from the study