2012 Best Practices for Government Libraries

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BEST PRACTICES 2012
username will be listed below their real name (e.g., MittRomney is Mitt Romney’s
username). If the person’s tweets are public, you can read all of them from the profile
page.
LinkedIn can be a helpful resource for finding employment history for a person.
From the homepage, Linkedin.com, you can search for a person by name, or browse the
member directory. Unfortunately, if the person you are searching has a common name,
you may not be able to find him. Without logging in to an account, LinkedIn allows you to
view only 25 results for a given name. If you are logged in to your own account, you can
view more results and sometimes more information on a person’s profile, but depending
on your own account settings, the person may be able to see that you viewed his or her
profile. For that reason, you may not want to search while logged in.
There are two newer sites to the social networking scene that you might not think
of searching. Google+ launched in 2011 and is Google’s answer to Facebook, minus the
addictive apps. Searching Google+ can be easily accomplished from the homepage,
plus.google.com, whether or not you have an account. While Google hasn’t publicized the
number of Google+ users, it surely is far fewer than the number of Facebook users. But
as Google pushes Google+ on its users of other products like Gmail and Google Reader,
the number of users is likely to rise. Pinterest is a social networking site that is gaining
users in the library field and beyond. The site allows users to create “virtual pinboards” to
share images and ideas they find on the Internet. A search box at the top of the screen
allows for easy searching for a person’s name. When you find a user’s profile, you can
browse their boards to view what they have pinned, or examine their activity, which
includes comments they have made to other people’s pins.
Searching social networking sites can be frustrating, particularly if you rely upon
the sites’ own search mechanisms. Luckily, searching many of these sites can be
accomplished via Google. This is a handy trick for searching any site that has a poor or
difficult-to-find search engine (unless for some reason that site has blocked Google from
crawling it). Go to Google.com and, as part of your search query, include site:[URL of
site]. For example, searching site:facebook.com would bring up results from Facebook.
Add a person or company’s name to the search query to find that person or company’s
profile or to find mentions of that person or company (e.g., site:facebook.com “Hillary
Clinton”). If you know the name the person uses on their profile, you can search for that
exact name (e.g., site:facebook.com “Hillary Rodham Clinton”) to try to limit to posts that
person made. One great thing about searching social networking sites via Google is that
you don’t need to be signed in to an account for a site to search it. As we mentioned with
Facebook and Twitter, many of these sites make it difficult to find their search
mechanisms without being signed in. But another perk is that you may find information
that you wouldn’t have found searching the sites themselves. On Facebook, for example,
a user can set their privacy settings so that you cannot find their profile through an online
search. But you may still be able to see something that person posted to Facebook if they
posted it to a public page (like one for a company or event), or on the page of someone
who does not have stringent privacy settings. Google can also be great for searching
LinkedIn if the person has a common name. For example, if you’re looking for a John
Smith who has worked at GEICO, you can search site:linkedin.com john smith geico. The
name searches on LinkedIn’s own site do not allow you to search by company as well.