Who says your students are the only ones who can have fun making fake Facebook profiles? At the University of Nevada, Reno, the director of research collections and services, Donnelyn Curtis, decided to bring a pair of suitors (turned married couple) from the early 1900s to life.

This reminds me of how much fun we librarians can bring to our jobs, animating our resources in a way that both draw in patrons to consider our great stuff and model digital creation for students. Enjoy!

On Facebook, Librarian Brings 2 Students From the Early 1900s to Life – Wired Campus – The Chronicle of Higher Education via kwout

***Update 1/12: Facebook has suspended these accounts.

***Update 3/28/2012: This project has been re-animated using Facebook pages instead of a Facebook profile. Check out the latest in American Libraries.

Apparently, it’s mostly the people who work there. From D-Lib’s November-December issue comes a short paper that looked at randomly-selected academic libraries from the QS list of best-ranked world universities:

Academic Libraries on Facebook: An Analysis of Users’ Comments
Michalis Gerolimos
Alexander Technological Educational Institute of Thessaloniki, Greece
mike@ionio.gr
doi:10.1045/november2011-gerolimos

ABSTRACT
This paper examines users’ comments on the Facebook pages of 20 American academic libraries and subdivides them into 22 categories. A total of 3,513 posts were examined and analyzed in various ways, including how many of the posts included user comments and how many had none; how many comments were included in each post; and what the percentage of user participation was on the library walls, in terms of “likes” and comments. The most significant findings are that approximately 91% of the posts do not include any comments, over 82% of user participation is expressed via the “like” functionality and most comments on academic libraries’ Facebook pages are not uploaded by prospective users (i.e., college and university faculty and students) but rather by library personnel, employees affiliated with the same institution as the library, and alumni.

While it is a bit of apples and oranges to compare academic library behaviors with those in school libraries, I wonder how this finding jives with what you see happening in your school. Thoughts?

During the 4T Virtual Conference a few weeks ago, hosted by the educational technology classes of the University of Michigan MAC programs, Liz Kolb reminded us about My Fakewall, which lets students create faux Facebook pages for historical or literary figures. For those of you who want to try Facebook-like activities but Facebook is blocked (or not age-appropriate), this could be a good option.

This kind of thing is becoming a popular project at multiple grade levels (I saw a cool paper version at Plymouth’s East Middle School a few months ago), so I thought you might enjoy taking a look. I’m pretty fond of the Cinderella one, myself!

Since it is gaining in popularity, it might be worth checking with your colleagues to make sure you’re not duplicating assignments. Nothing tanks a creative assignment like finding out that the students “just did that.” :)

My Fake Wall – MyFakeWall.com via kwout