Use of Web 2.0 tools in academic libraries: A reconnaissance of the international landscape

A Study on the use of Facebook, RSS, Blogs and Twitter (Web2.0) among selected academic libraries from 6 Gulf countries namely: Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman and Kuwait

“…In another study conducted by Tripathi and Kumar (2010), they indicated that RSS, instant messaging and blogs were the most commonly used Web 2.0 technologies deployed by academic libraries (Tripathi & Kumar, 2010). They surveyed 277 university library websites from Australia, Canada, United Kingdom and the United States.…”

“…They surveyed 277 university library websites from Australia, Canada, United Kingdom and the United States. It revealed that out of 151 websites from United States 56% are using instant messaging, 34% uses blog while 22% deploy RSS (Tripathi & Kumar, 2010). On the other hand, 35% of 82 library web sites from United Kingdom are using RSS, followed by blog (26%) and instant messaging (7%).…”

“…Tripathi and Kumar described RSS usage in the USA was for communicating general news and university news followed by library news and events and new books (Tripathi & Kumar, 2010). Academic libraries in UK used RSS for the same reasons as the United States.…”

“…The use of blogs in the study conducted by Tripathi and Kumar (2010) revealed that 30% of surveyed libraries in US stated blogs were deployed to communicate to their users on new databases, followed by general information (26 per cent) and downtime of servers/databases (23%) (Tripathi & Kumar, 2010). UK libraries tend to use blogs for disseminating information of new databases (24%), followed by downtime of servers/databases (21%) and informing users of the libraries' hours of operation/holidays (20%).…”

“…However, the authors added some good practices for combining both the Web 2.0 tools and library services. Among them, they mentioned that blogs should be created to address the specific needs to a particular user group, publishing a set of rules and regulations on the acceptable behavior when using the Web 2.0 tools and these tools should be "used with well-defined purposes and standard norms" (Tripathi & Kumar, 2010). …”