Just a note - this is actually cut-and-pasted from a reply to someone I made on the service my personal blog is on, when I mentioned I was in a session on Facebook and libraries. They asked how and why a library would use Facebook, so I summed up the session, and realized: hey, I've got my 800mice post on it. :)
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According to this session, if you as a librarian create a Facebook page for yourself, it serves as another point of contact for patrons. Although they caution that *you* initiating friending with students or patrons can make you seem like Uncle Creepy, so it's best to let them initiate it.
Making a fan page for your library on Facebook can be good, because it allows you to post announcements and use it as advertising and outreach (fan pages are what Facebook set up for groups and organizations to do to get a presence on Facebook - Facebook users can fan them, instead of friending them, without letting their profile be seen). And if you collaborate with an individual, you can set up Events or send out flyers on Facebook.
Outside of student-librarian interactions, librarians can network with each other via Facebook.
The University of North Carolina recruited students for a focus group via Facebook and got more respondents, and more diverse respondents, than they ever had before.
OTOH, there are multiple studies, which I've read about and heard about in other session, that say many students don't *want* the library coming in to their world - they want to keep Facebook social and not academic. So there are good arguments both ways. All the studies I've heard about, however, do say that younger students show less reluctance to have Facebook invaded by their library, and they project that in the future, that trend will get stronger.
The session was titled "Facebook Apps & Libraries' Friendly Future," by Laurie Bridges and Cliff Landis, and the Powerpoint presentation is up on Slideshare. (A lot of the Computers in Libraries presentations are up there, actually, and the CiL website will have most of the presentations up within a couple of weeks. There's also the conference wiki, which has links to the official conference bloggers as well, if you want to go see what they're saying about the sessions.)
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Anyway, if we want to create a Facebook fan page for the library, that might be an interesting idea to see what happens, since so many of our students are on Facebook. The example they showed in the presentation had fairly basic info - the library's information like hours, direction, etc., and it was used for announcements as well. I'm sure we could repeat some of the What's New stuff that would be especially targeted towards students over on Facebook.
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