I’ve been so involved with blogs and what twitter is that I have been ignoring the obvious - people still think that the Historical Society Library is on 4th St. They come in all the time saying, “When did you guys move?” and when I tell them I get a weird look. We always talk about it saying, “We’ve updated our web pages, haven’t we?” Well… I don’t think our customers are looking at our web pages to figure out where we are. I think that they use Google Maps. That’s what I use. It’s what a lot of people I know use.

And then I got a BrightKite invitation and I put two and two together. BrightKite is a geographically based social networking web system. When I typed in “Boise” and “Library” I got some really bizarre results!

First, my library is listed incorrectly with the wrong address. Also, the new branches are missing. And, Boise Public Library Main is listed on here many times over (three times on the first page of results), and if you look at the results you’ll see even more in later pages (there were more than 800 libraries according to Google Maps in Boise, Idaho). I am going to change the wrong information for my library right now, so the results should change, so when you click on this link it will appear differently than it does to me right now. And I’m going to explain how I do it.

I went to Google Local Business and requested that our business be added. This service is free. I included hours and services, phone number and email contact information. I chose to validate this information by having Google mail me a postcard. You can also have them call you, but I will be in and out of the office the next week, so I didn’t want to risk missing the call and not being validated!

I am also going to add “user generated content” right now! At the bottom of the results it says, “Can’t find what you’re looking for? See user generated content, or add a place to the map!” I’m going to do both. It took about 30 seconds to add the information and now it will be “searchable in just a few minutes”!

Check your library! Are you listed? Listed how? Should you tag your library as books, coffee, computers, etc. or just call it a library!?