Evaluation of DocuMenea, a social platform for Library and Information Science news

One of the most popular services in web 2.0 is the social promotion of news. Digg and Menéame –the second one in Spain and Latin America–, are very well known. Using Menéame open code, a team of information professionals created DocuMenea with the same characteristics but limited to Library and Information Science. This paper presents an evaluation of this service from its creation in November 2006 to December 2008. The results show that 2,166 news items were sent and 1,610 were published. The service has 582 users, with unequal participation because 74% of them never had sent any news and 91% did not vote on any occasion. Four thematic areas were identified: Google, libraries, social networking / Web 2.0, and the book. Finally, sources in which the top three positions were occupied by daily general interest newspapers were ranked as the most important to DocuMenea