Social Networking at VBPL

I personally do not think that the VBPL should use social networking sites to try and reach our teens. I am not saying that it isn’t something that could be used in the future, but at this point in time I feel we need to focus elsewhere. I feel this way for a number of reasons.
First, and the most basic reason being, I see social networking sites as a place to talk to friends and find out about the newest gossip. I think that I am not the only one who feels this way. So my Facebook account is not the fist place I would go when looking for a new book to read or homework help. Many of the articles referred to social networking as a new version of the traditional teen hangout. My question then becomes how much would the library’s presence be accepted and used in this setting? Because of these questons I think that we need to focus more on improving our website, creating a stronger blog presence, etc. before adding social networking to our to-do list. The main concept that is attractive to me about social networking is a reader’s advisory sort of blog, and we already have that in another format.
Another reason I feel this way is because the VBPL system does not employ young adult librarians. If we design a Facebook or MySpace account we would need to do almost daily maintenance and regulate what is being posted etc. And with the frightening number of problems that come with these sites someone would have to really watch what is taking place on there. The main problems that I pulled from the articles included;
Sexual Predators
Scams
Porn
Impersonators
Cyber Bullying
Explicit Content
Pictures and Text being used as Evidence Against the Poster
Etc…
So, if the library did decide to use social networking we would have to be super careful that none of these things took place involving our page. And can we really control this? I am not an expert so I really don’t know what we can control. All we need is one wrong comment posted to our wall or one incident somehow connected to our site to cause a controversy. With my own Facebook account I use the highest security settings and have it blocked so that no one can become my friend unless I first ask them. With a public page we couldn’t be as careful or set security as high.
I am not closed to the idea of one day working with social networking in the library. But I would like to hear how we are going to;
1) Attract teens to the site and have them actually use it in a meaningful way
2) Protect those teens and ourselves within this environment