Social Networks as a Platform for Academic Interaction: Possibilities and Challenges for Indian Academic Libraries.

Social media encompasses many forms such as social networking sites like blogs, vlogs, instant messaging and virtual communities. Among the social media, Facebook appeared as a major platform and emerged as a winner because of its large user base. The rapid rise of social media provides numerous possibilities for academic institutions to exploit this media to extend its learning and teaching endeavors. Nonetheless, this has no boundary; it is suitable for administrators, managers, learners and teachers in academic institutions too. The Social networking is a medium that lets the users to interact and work collaboratively with others, including the ability to browse, search, invite friends to connect and interact across the globe. Several opportunities have been emerged for academic libraries in augmenting their basic objectives like identifying right users communities, their need and proactive teaching learning services to its users. Social software in the web 2.0 world not only enhances the practical usability in the library but also helps the diminishing librarian’s role through value addition to profession itself. In this paper, select cases of social academic networks are described and different perspectives have been given on how academic libraries are participating in this massive social networking drive. Also, an attempt has been made to analyze social media presence of select Indian academic libraries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]