Case Studies: Week 3- More Blogs

What a difference between these blogs and the ones we looked at last week! I was pretty impressed by most of them.

Darien Library seems to understand the importance of a blog having a specific focus & voice. I think that they have successfully managed this by having multiple blogs about different topics. Their menu of various blogs is well-laid out and not an intimidating list. They also clearly indicate that you are moving to a blog which we have seen is important (Catalyst). This seems to be a good way to get around the problem of many different audiences that will not be appreciative of the same information and tones. In other library blogs that attempt to serve all patrons with one blog tend to lose their 'personality' as they water everything down to appeal to all.

I really liked the Library Lounge! It was chatty, laidback, interesting and linked to some cool sites. It still managed to provide library news without feeling like a mere newsboard. The Categories down the side are good for navigating to topics. I do wonder who the intended audience was though ...it doesn't seem to be fully focused on patron topics, but still did provide some information on library services, etc.

Gameblog!?! Success.
It did take me a moment to figure out what it was, but once my non-gaming brain clued in, I was very impressed! There seems to be a lot of interaction and commenting. The moderators seemed to do well to speak the teen lingo and facilitate without standing out as 'authority'.

Mabry: Wow - much like Gameblog, I think they've done a great job. What a smart use of a blog! The teacher index makes it very easy to navigate the various blogs. Some are much better then others, but I do like that each blog is clearly associated with one person (or by function, like the Cafe).

Both the Neilsen and Scout article underline the importance of a blogging personality. This is perhaps why the Mabry site and Gameblog work because they have Neilsen's suggested photo and profile.

The VCU suggestion blog succeeds in providing a forum for communicating with students - it's a clear topic. I like that the suggestions and responses are posted together so there is no risk of an unanswered suggestion sitting on the blog for a long period of time. Here, you don't have the blog personalities, but I think that it is not as important for this blog as it is focussed on responding to questions supplied by its intended audience.

So, despite some minor flaws, why do I feel that these blogs are better than last week's blogs? I think the key is that they have a clear focus. There is a purpose for each blog and, in each case, a blog seems to be a good vehicle for communicating the desired information. They have moved beyond the mere 'newsboard' blog.

Blog Ethics & Etiquette – different standards for library bloggers?

Check, check...and check! I am all for the ‘Bloggers' Code’ suggestions that are laid out by Blood, Schneider, and cyberjournalist.net . The one that most struck me (and I am totally guilty of it…I edit my posts all the time without a thought to its impact…I guess I’ll stop that habit!) is Blood’s statement that one should write an entry as though it could not be changed, and that rewrites should not be done (although others seem to think this is okay if you show the editing with cross-outs and amendment notes, etc) and that a post should never be deleted.

For a library, I do think that this 'Bloggers' Code' goes one step further as the blog will represent the branch, and the entire system. In the same way that a newspaper article would get confirmed with a manager or a PR person before it is published (thank you Martha Joyce & LIS506-Management) a blog would need to be cleared as well. It is, after all, an official publication of the library. Because of the frequency of a blog, having each post signed off on could be a time-consuming process that would negate one of the biggest benefits of the blog – how quick & easy it is to publish and update.

Perhaps a better way of dealing with this would be to have a standard set of guidelines drawn up (there may already be policies in place from other publications) so that a true “sign-off” is only required when the blogger has doubts about the content meeting the guidelines. This isn’t a personal blog. It should be treated with the same rules as any other library publication, except perhaps, that the tone may be more casual or chatty.

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.

Cases Studies - Library Blogs

I think that the first 3 libraries have been successful at making their blogs fit seamlessly into their website. The purpose of the blogs in all three cases appears to be an easy way to keep users up to date on the latest library news and events. Although all three allowed for commenting if registered, I noticed more comments on Ann Arbor library's and Georgia State's blogs (although only a few posts on Georgia States allowed comments - where comments were allowed, the participation seems fairly high). I wonder if this is simply because the topics were more "newsie" and "debatable" than standard library and community announcements. Some of the Ann Arbor posts were very successful at creating a dialogue (i.e. Season 4 Ideas: Player Ratings.)

The Western Springs history blog was quite unique from the others. It seems to act more like a website than a blog, although as a blog, it does provide a forum for discussion and I did notice several comments and discussion. I loved that neighbours would log on and provide extra little tidbits of information about various homes. It seems to be an effective way to gather additional information. This seems like such a *nice* idea - and very engaging to the community. I would totally log on to something like this for my hood and for the dish about past residents and new additions, etc.

Bloggeriffic...

Some interesting thoughts on blogging in the readings. I had no idea how blogging came to be nor, as many have mentioned, did I think it was happening as early as 1997! I remember just starting to hear about it 3 or 4 years ago and thought it was brand new! I sort of lament that I was unaware of blogging in its early days when it was a small community as opposed to the messy, tangled web it is now.

I liked Rebecca Blood's description of what she feels the process brings to the blogger...reflection, self-growth, discovery of a voice. My first reaction to this was that any process of daily writing would bring the same things, but I have never considered how identifying sites & articles that you deem to be important or of interest could also add to this self-reflection process...

I am a bit intimidated by all of the blogging options out there...Blogger was the only one I was familiar with so it is the one that I used for this blog. It was definitely very easy to set up and now I see that it is one of the most user-friendly as the readings tend to portray it as a sort of the "training wheels" version of a blog. I see a lot of you have used Wordpress...how was it to set up, etc? It seem as though Wordpress might be the best of all worlds: still free and quite user-friendly, but offering significantly more features.

Has anyone tried any other ones and can comment on their experience? Christy does a good job of extolling the virtues of LiveJournal in her post.

As far as selecting the right tool to use in creating a blog for a library, it would be important to be able to customize it so that you could brand it with the library logo and ensure that the user does not think that they have left the library site. I think the choice would vary depending on what the functions the library hopes to use. I would imagine that most would be less interested in networking features as these would be difficult to monitor for mis-use. Of the library blogs in the case studies, most seem to use the blogs largely as a bulletin board so additional features would perhaps be a consideration for the future. Perhaps reliability of the server, ease of use, and password protection would be most important in the beginning?