Compliments, Complaints, and Conversations

Have you googled your library recently?

If you haven’t, what you find may surprise you.  That man you saw earlier today picking up his holds may be thinking about writing a review that mentions how much he likes dropping by the library to grab his books and go.  The fact is our patrons, both the satisfied and dissatisfied, are talking about us in their blogs on review sites like Yelp.  These sites enable our customers to reach larger audiences than ever before, and to share what they like and dislike about the service provided.  This is something libraries should be thinking about and preparing for.

Once you’re aware of these review sites the library has some questions to answer.   Should the library join these sites and add reviews or other content?  Should the library respond to negative reviews, correct inaccurate information, and so on?  Who’ll be responsible for periodically checking these sites and what guidelines should they be working with.

I’d encourage libraries to consider adding content to review sites, especially in cases where the library hasn’t yet been reviewed.  These first reviews represent an opportunity to share services the library offers such as Wi-Fi, and virtual reference service.  Be up front about identifying yourself as the library and keep it brief.   Be factual and focus on services, let your customers be the ones to offer praise.

Libraries should consider carefully how or if they’ll respond to reviews.    My advice would be to let the community police itself and to have faith that the good service you provide will balance out the occasional poor review.  Yelp offers some good advice for business owners that also applies to libraries.

Some highlights:

“Don’t review your own business anonymously or get your friends to do the same.

Don’t overestimate the impact of a single negative review.  It happens to even the best businesses.  That said if you see a trend of negative reviews, you may want to take this feedback and determine if there is a way to improve your business.

Do add photos to your business page and make sure the business information is correct.

Do review your own business, clearly stating that you are the business owner. Full disclosure is important here, and will be critical in earning the respect of the Yelp community.”

Review sites like these are expanding rapidly, building off people’s inherent desire to create and share information.  Libraries that embrace these web 2.0 tools have an opportunity to open a dialog with their customers which may lead to beneficial relationships for both.

A customer, who wrote a positive review about the library, may be the person you think of when you’re looking for a person to offer a patron perspective on the library’s blog.  And even a negative review offers the chance to get feedback about ways we might improve our services, practices, or policies.  Our customers are talking about us.  It’s time for libraries to join the conversation.

This post originally appeared in Foreword Magazine’s Shelf Space blog June 2008.

Let’s talk…why we blog

I love my job. As a Collection Development librarian I get to buy DVDs, music and downloads for my library system.  This means that I get to follow technology trends-which soothes my inner geek-and also share my passion for intellectual freedom.  Forget the, I  “heart” the First Amendment bumper sticker; I want the first amendment tattoo-Congress shall make no law….

But for all that passion and love of my job, there’s a tradeoff, isolation.  No matter how much I’d like to, I’ll never be able to visit branch libraries as frequently as I’d like to discuss collections.   And while I don’t consider my library unusual, the collections in our libraries have undergone some significant changes recently.  Since 2004, the year I joined Collection Development, we’ve added streaming music and video, done away with nearly all analog media, begun offering downloadable audio and video, as well as begun floating our collection amongst our libraries.

In light of all this change, the Collection Development department began blogging last year as a supplement to our other communication methods.  For most staff, our communication with them was more of a broadcast of information either through email, or our Tech News newsletter which while effective in its way tended to be somewhat formal.   Our blog with its more conversational tone, we hoped would start a dialog between us and staff, and also since we’ve added librarians and switched around a few selection areas, help branch staff put a face to a name.

Overall, our blog has been fairly successful at both of those goals, modest though they are.  Since we began, the blog has been visited over 8,000 times and visitors have left 170 comments on our 206 posts.  And while we’d like to see a lot more comments, we’re happy with the efficiency that blogging affords us in our communication with staff.  Since blogs are by their nature, archival and searchable staff can locate postings easily-a benefit anyone who’s ever lost an email that included a link you needed to retrieve quickly, can appreciate.

The Nuts and Bolts

Before we began we discussed a number of technical and strategic items.  Which software should we use for our blog?  Should the blog be internal and password protected or open to the public?  Who would be posting and what level of administrative rights would they have?  What sort of content would we focus on and how often should we post?

We decided to use WordPress as our platform over Blogger because we wanted to quantify the success of our blog and WordPress offers a free statistical package that is surprisingly robust.  By using WordPress, we can track which posts are the most popular, see how people are finding us, as well as a number of other useful reports all of which can be run either by day, week, month, or all time.  Since both Blogger and WordPress are free this choice was easy.

We chose to make our blog open to the public, rather than internal and password protected.  We began our blog with no real marketing push other than an introductory email, and some announcements at a meeting of supervisors.  We had no idea how well the blog would be received and wanted to make it as easy as we could for staff to find us initially.

Internally we decided that anyone within the Collection Development department would be able to post to the blog, though only a few of us would have full administrative privileges.  By allowing support  staff to post to the blog we could  build off some of the work they were already doing, such as posting lists of newly purchased items  that had been going into a public folder in Outlook email.  These email postings are popular with some staff and we wanted our blog to offer the same information in an alternative stream rather than replace email.  Since the public folders in Outlook are emptied every two weeks automatically, the blog also allowed us to offer an archive of these lists.  Because support staff could publish the list with only a few clicks and a cut & paste the duplication of effort for these lists was minimal.

The content of the blog tends toward the short and sweet.  We want content to change often giving staff a reason to visit frequently.  Though we’ll occasionally post longer articles, many of which appear in our Tech News newsletter also,  we tend to blog more in snippets of brief text with links for greater detail.  The most frequent topics are not surprisingly publishing news and technology.  Since our blog is public some purely administrative content goes through our more traditional communication channels.    Finally, since our aim was to create a dialog with staff we opted to allow comments with minimal moderation.   The first time a visitor leaves a comment , it must be approved by myself or another administrator.  Once a comment by a visitor has been approved though, all subsequent comments publish to the blog immediately.

Though libraries and situations differ, many communication challenges are the same from library to library. Blogs with their archival nature, ease of searching, and conversational tone can provide a channel for fast , efficient, information sharing and communication between staff in libraries large and small.

This post originally appeared in Shelf Space ( ForeWord magazine’s blog).  June 2008

Blogging for Collection Development

My first post for ForeWord Magazine’s blog, “Shelf Space” was about how Technical Services departments can use blogging to bridge the gap between administrative offices and community libraries.  You can read more here.

Welcome

If awhile ago, someone had told me that I would need not just one blog for work but several and it still wouldn’t be enough, I think I might have asked them, ‘what was in the kool-aid’ they were drinking, and could I have some. And yet strangely enough that is exactly the place I find myself in now. Currently, I’m authoring a departmental blog, a Learning 2.0 blog, and contributing to others as well.

Recently, I was asked to be a guest blogger for Shelf Space, a blog run by the people at ForeWord magazine. In her nicely worded invitation Whitney, asked me to include a bio and headshot and to include a link to my blog. Which made me realize that although I’m doing a lot of blogging for work, I haven’t been blogging about libraries, technology, and downloadable media in any kind of personal way.

In July I’ll be speaking at Digipalooza 2008, the International OverDrive User Group conference about blogging, learning 2.0 programs and downloads and wouldn’t it just seem strange to listen to someone speak about blogging–and then find out they didn’t have a personal website–it strains the credibility of the speaker I think.

So, to rectify this situation I’m happy to add my little site to the blogosphere. Welcome and thanks.