As part of the 2009 WebJunction Member survey, we wanted to assess how much our members use online tools, especially “web 2.0” tools that have developed in recent years. This gives us a sense of what experience and what expectations are community has around web tools, and helps to put WebJunction.org's tools into that context.
The figure below shows the results from the 884 people who chose to respond to that question.
These results show that a significant majority of our community use listservs, with 73% using them on a daily or weekly basis. Online news is also heavily used, 56% on a daily or weekly basis. Social networking showed the largest division among WebJunction members’ online habits, with 47% using such sites on a daily or weekly basis, and 39% never using them. Similarly, blogs are heavily used by 42% but never by 32%.
It is interesting to see those areas that show such a polarization of results. Our community includes folks who have not embraced collaborative web tools, as well as those who appear to have assimilated them completely into their lives. This leads us to ask: Do you feel there is value in social networking and other tools of the participatory web? Or do you see it as just a time-wasting fad? We would love to hear your opinions and experiences with web 2.0; please post your comments to this document.
The other question one could ask is, Is the usage rates depicted in these results about the same as society at large? Lower? Higher? The Pew Charitable Trust studies are keeping tabs on adoption rates of online tools and social networking. For example, they report that as of December 2008, 35% of online adults have at least one social network profile, up from 8% in 2005. Considering that 62% of our surveyed members report having at least one online profile, we can venture to say that librarians are well ahead of the curve!
