Biblioteket på Facebook. En studie av hur akademiska bibliotek och folkbibliotek i Sverige använder sig av Facebook.

Sammanfattning: This study investigates the use of the social network Facebook among 67 Swedish libraries; 27 academic libraries and 40 public libraries. Data is collected through an analysis of the libraries’ Facebook pages and through an email survey. To analyze the data, a series of statistical analyses were performed.The results indicate that the public libraries more actively posted Facebook updates than the academic libraries and that the libraries that had a policy for use of Facebook/social media more actively posted updates than those libraries that did not have such policy. The libraries use Facebook mainly to post links and photos and to announce events, provide book recommendations, and to emphasize special occasions. The public libraries posted more links and more updates about events, book recommendations, and media recommendations than the academic libraries while the academic libraries posted more updates about digital resources, research results, and job advertisements. At the majority of the libraries’ Facebook pages the communication with the users consists of one-way-communication. The most common reasons to use Facebook that the libraries report are to create a dialogue with the users, to be where the users are, to market the library and to reach out to groups that traditionally are hard to reach out to.Conclusions are that the libraries’ Facebook communication reflects the library as an institution by largely dealing with things that concerns reading and education, and that Facebook is used more as a tool for marketing than as a tool for dialogue with the users.