Why are libraries blogging? The Purpose & Design of Library Blogs

This week’s readings seemed to deal a bit with a question that had been rolling around in my head since we’ve started looking at library blogs: Why are libraries blogging? In many instances, it seems as though someone mentioned that blogging was the ‘hot, new thing’ and that libraries should come on board, so they created a blog because…well, because they wanted to have a blog.

Having a blog simply for the sake of ‘having a blog’ seems like a recipe for failure. In the Scout article, two of the main points highlight this: determine whether a blog is right for your company and develop a content strategy. If content isn’t the driving force, should there even be a blog? I was pleased to see that the first decision in creating a company blog was to question whether a blog is actually the tool that best meets the needs. Applying Neilson’s usability ideals to a blog is important, especially if it is an institution’s blog. As Schneider points out, librarians represent librarianship…and so do their blogs. While, in general, it is intended to be more casual than a website, there is no reason that a blog cannot heed its audience and use good design principles that will meet their needs.

We should be using blogs as a tool to communicate something that our current communication methods are not, or to add an additional outlet to these methods. Perhaps the question to start with is ‘what information or service do I want to provide?’ Is it sharing library news, providing a forum for feedback, giving a ‘human face’ to an online library via a chatty librarian blog? It strikes me that we should be starting from the goal we hope to achieve before we decide how to do it. Just for the record, I do think that blogs are a great tool for libraries and would encourage their use where they fit the need. There are a million great possible uses for blogs within a library.

That being said, the adoption of a new technology simply because it exists is silly! If a library blog is created simply “to have a blog”, this will show in its content…unless a reason for having a blog is discovered, it may come across like nothing more than an attempt to appear hip, relevant, and tech-savvy. And that’s none too hip.