Academic Libraries in Social Networking Environments

from Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe, Head of the Undergraduate Library at the University of Illinois, Urbana/Champaign:

"...We (in the UIUC Library) have taken the tact of inserting ourselves into the social space [MySpace and facebook] to help invite students into our "academic space"...
"We have students contacting us for research assistance, etc. through these social sites. If you look on the right hand side, you will also see an embedded search of our federated search engine and the invite that students can embed the search in their own MySpace site too."
"To quote a student, Undergrad is "One of the coolest, most user-friendly libraries in the whole world."....

[ARB's note: as one indicator of cool & user-friendly, there's a Gaming Collection prominently featured on the Undergrad's home page]