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
