I've been thinking about library blogs a lot lately. For a year now we've been talking about launching our ‘official' blog, but we keep hitting snags.
A concept that we are building around is that postings tagged as ‘library news' will appear on our homepage—allowing people from different internal departments the opportunity to share news with the wider community. This moves us away from the 1 person controls the homepage dilemma.
Then there will be other tags too, such as engineering news, or science news, or business news (not sure if we're going to use the term news , but you get the point) — the rest of these will show up on a second tier page and patrons can subscribe or browse content. The point of all this is that I am starting to feel skeptical. Will patrons care? Will they even bother to read our content? Is it worth the effort?
I looked at the bloglines subscriptions for GSU and NCSU and the numbers are low:
Georgia State Library News = 17 subscribers
NCSU Library News = 22 subscribers
And you have to think that some of those are internal.
So is it worth doing a news blog? There is the argument that most of the world doesn't use RSS yet, and that they browse, so user count could higher than is perceived.
What about discipline focused blogs?
GSU Science News = 35 subscribers
NCSU Physical & Engineering Sciences News = 9 (the new books are cool though)
You'd think that these blogs would appeal more to specific students and faculty sets, but the numbers still relatively low. Especially since both institutions have over 25,000 students.
Relevance & Authenticity. Those are two concepts I've been thinking about a lot lately. Without them, we'll never sell students on our blogs. I'm thinking I need to break away from the library project and attempt something more enterprising. We're C-list, maybe B-list to a few… so we need to bring in some A-listers to the fold.
Whenever I go to my bloglines, after scanning my friend's blogs/journals, the first library blog I look at is ACRLog . What appeals to me is that it is a collective effort and that the topics are usually on target with the type of thing I want to read. So how can I build that same sense of value for my patrons? Include others!
Next week, while everyone's at ALA , I'm going to launch a GT Computer Science Blog. I'm hoping to talk two professors into it, along with two students, and maybe someone who is administrative- such as an advisor.
The blog will focus on providing information to the 1,300+ CS majors. News about projects and research at GT, industry news, interviews with notable alumni, job opportunities, study sessions, software/hardware reviews, class changes or other admin info, campus events, and oh yeah, an occasional push for library sessions, services, and resources.
Rather than thinking that my message is important, I am bundling it with messages that they will find important. Rather than trying to create interest in a library blog about computer science, I am seeking to create a computer science blog with a librarian as contributor. We'll see where it goes.
As for library news blogs, I definitely think we have to try, and look forward to our launch... however, if students feel they should (or have to) read their department/college/school blog, than I definitely want to be involved. Seems win-win-win all around. And if the department/college/school promotes and integrates the blog into their website as well as Course Management System (we're moving to Sakai) then that will increase readership.
I don't know, maybe just some dreams on a Friday afternoon...
Just two things to mention.
First, I've been saying (and writing) for sometime that it's highly unlikely that our user communities are going to be motivated to subscribe to our blogs using aggregators. This technology is not mainstream (yet). That's why I advocate using tech to push the blog posts into courses.
Second, this week I attended a local seminar on corporate blogging (I did a presentation on blogs,RSS, aggregators, and wikis). The keynoter was the new media guru for IBM. He talked about the importance of blogging in a way that invites participation. He said that being intentionally controversial usually works once or twice, but rarely sustains an audience. It needs to be a mix of expertise (you can learn by reading this), challenging readers with interesting content, and the occasional post about something that's not what the blog is usually about. There was more to it than that, but it was a good presentation about developing an audience. Based on what I heard, library news blogs are pretty far off the mark. It's causing me to rethink what a library blog might be.
Posted by: steven bell | January 12, 2007 at 05:56 PM
Guess you can count me among those who subscribed to NCSU Library News Feed - more out of RSS curiosity than information seeker...
Posted by: dkemper | January 16, 2007 at 11:59 AM
Good points and good ideas, Brian. Just wanted to remind folks that Bloglines isn't the only aggregator out there, so your numbers are undoubtedly a little bit low, though I'd guess by no more than 50%, which is still a pretty small subscriber base (for instance, according to Feedburner, 63% of my blog's subscribers are on Bloglines. It is the single biggest group)
Posted by: Paul R. Pival | January 17, 2007 at 12:42 PM