JSTOR is the popular, nonprofit digital archive of scholarly publications. The database has some content going back to the 17th century but their development team are well up there with 21st century technologies and are active on Facebook.
They have a Facebook page which has already attracted over 6,000 “fans”. If you become a fan you will be kept up to date with new JSTOR developments and have access to the JSTOR team. The page includes news, and links to new applications, tutorials and such like.
The JSTOR development team have developed a JSTOR search application for Facebook. This means you can search the JSTOR archive from within Facebook, once you download the Facebook app.
JSTOR is a subscription archive and not freely available. If you wish to access your university library’s subscription to the JSTOR archive from within Facebook you need to be either a student or staff. If off-campus you will need to be "savvy" and know how to add your library’s a "proxy server" settings to the URL. Then you will need to login and authenticate.
There's been some discussion on how useful having a database search application within Facebook really is. Especially if the resource is a subscription database such as JSTOR. There will be some who will find the mucking around with the URL worth it. From the librarian's point of view it does put your library's resources out there, where your users are.
Michael, Tame the Web, Stephens has an interesting post on university library Facebook applications , including JSTOR.
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