Week Three: Blogs again!

This week, Scout's article, "101: a primer" demonstrates how blogs can work well for libraries. Scout shows that blogs can market your organization through personal experience and insight rather than advertising and PR.  For a library, this could mean marketing reference, new books, services, kids/teen rooms or market for/with the community.  Multi-authored blogs can be beneficial to the public because they can offer a variance of opinion, categories, writing styles and target different audiences.  However, for the 'ethical' blogger, there needs to be guidelines to follow, such as posting frequency, abiding the mission, avoiding conflict with other authors and protecting library and user privacy. One way to practice safe blogging is what the VCU 'suggestion blog' does.  There is a warning before the comment field stating that comments will be approved before appearing on the site.  While I somewhat contemplated this being censorship, I think that this is a good component for a library blog to have, for example a blog for the community or a teen blog, in order to maintain the values of the library.  I feel that monitoring a blog is not censorship as long as the mission of the blog is clearly stated.  If it is clearly labeled and categorize that the blog is for teens, inappropriate language and comments have the right to be over-looked.     

One reason why I think library blogs work well refers to Scout's comment that 'customers' prefer to do their own research.  They are more likely to find information through friends, on the internet and recently, on blogs.  This is valuable for libraries because often in the library setting users will first attempt to find information on their own and through personal references rather than asking a librarian.  In this case, library blogs are advantageous because users are seeking information and entertainment by themselves, but there is also an interaction with the library.  This can help to create awareness of the physical library or lead the blogger to further their searches either online or beyond.  

This week got me thinking about how difficult a library blog can actually be.  Considering that libraries and librarians are presumed to be unbiased and neutral, writing about personal experience and opinions can be detrimental.  In this case, multi-authored blogs and blogs that are subject specific (such as the Darien blog, where you can enter blogs about new books, programs and teen blogs) are helpful because the content is written by the library materials and services, so to say, rather than written about/by the librarians and library.   Looks like the traditional 'diary' blog is not the only format of public blogging.