Sept 2011: 78% have Internet at home, 61% have broadband at home; 83% of all adults have mobile devices and 73% of adult cell owners use text messaging at least occasionally; 35% own smartphones; 64% of cell phone users send photos or videos and 55% access social networking sites; 60% of cell phone users who are on Twitter use the cell phone to access Twitter. "New media are the new neighborhood." 48% of those active in groups say group has a social networking page on site such as Facebook; 42% say group uses text messaging; 30% say group has own blog; 16% say group uses Twitter.

Phone interviews in May 2011 with 2,277 adult internet users ages 18 and older p.2 65% of online adults use social networking sites; p3 Of young adult women ages 18-29 who are online, 89% use social networking sites, 69% on an average day. Highest usage skews toward female and younger, but no significant differences in usage by race, household income, geography and education level.

p.31 Of 366 university undergrads surveyed in 2008, 92.3% used Facebook and 41.3% MySpace, only 21 students used neither; 74.9% were willing to 'friend' the library; 79.2% were willing to receive announcements & communications from library via FB/MySpace

p.252 No clear distinction between questions that may challenge librarians' comfort levels and those that cannot be answered for truly technical reasons; typically answered in 2-4 hours p256 "reference" questions take longer; p.258 where a "thank you" was received, on average, was three times faster than the response time for no "thank you"; 8% were from users in the library.

p.13 24/7 SMS service consortium (2009): Alliance Library System, SJSU, TAP Information Services, Bradley University, South Central Regional Library Council & Altarama Information Systems. Article includes statistics on cell phone usage & texting from 2007 Pew Internet & American Life Project survey ("58 percent of Americans surveyed have sent or received text messages") and 2008 Student Monitor survey ("nearly nine in ten students own a cellular telephone"; "students spend 37.8 percent of their cellphone usage time texting")

p.403 SMS reference early adopters: Curtin University of Technology in Western Australia & Southeastern Louisiana University, USA. p.404 unless you are quite concise, librarians may need to learn some texting abbreviations. It is possible to send the response in multiple messages (known as spanning); however, our librarians try very hard to fit a reply into one.It is made very clear that SMS reference should be used for short simple factual questions.

p.6 the social networking site Facebook moved from a relative non-factor to near ubiquity in large libraries: for libraries serving communities of at least 500,000 people, the ratio of those with a Facebook presence jumped from barely one in ten in 2008 (11%) to 4 out of 5 (80%) in 2010.

SMS text messaging services in libraries