Blogs

It was great to read Rebecca Blood’s history of weblogs. I wasn’t reading blogs in the late 1990s, but I now remember that the friends who were reading them were interested in politics and world events and wanted the (usually) contrary and clever perspective that blogs added to the mainstream media. Blogs helped to organize information, and create discussion about it. I’d gotten used to thinking of them as largely vanity sites, with varying degrees of engagement with the outside world. I was recently impressed to hear about meta-critic.com http://www.metacritic.com/, which ranks albums etc. according to the combined reviews they have received from a number of critics (up to 100 if I’m correct). This seemed to me a new and clever way to organize at least one universe of the internet, but I guess in the beginning most blogs made themselves useful like this.

Unfortunately, I very rarely take the time to read blogs. This question of readership was on my mind as I looked at the case studies. Who is reading these library blogs? Does anyone ever get past the first three headlines? I like the idea of receiving a monthly newsletter, looking it over, and then getting rid of it, knowing that I am reasonably up-to-date until next month. I am not likely to make a point of regularly checking out my library’s blog just to see what’s going on. RSS feeds solve this to an extent, but not everyone signs up for them.

While I was on co-op my library used free blog software to create a newsletter for faculty. We discussed various options for making the blog stand out from the overwhelming amount of notices/information/emails that faculty already received. The staff decided to publish a new set of headlines at regular intervals, email a link to faculty at that time, and include a table of contents in the email. It therefore really resembled a traditional newsletter. At the library we often had to consider whether resources would please older (for the most part) faculty, who liked traditional print resources, as well as those who were more savvy.

As for the case studies, I found the Madison-Jefferson County Public Library blog to be very well written and well organized. Entries were just long enough and just snappy enough to keep me reading. I liked that the Ann-Arbor blog had a picture of the actual library on the front, reminding us that it’s a real place that we can visit. I had at first thought that the head shot on the home page was of a librarian, it wasn’t, but that would have added to the feeling that I was not just in a virtual world. Again, this might be important for users who don’t spend a lot of time on the web, or don’t really like it. The Georgia State University blog felt a bit random. At first there didn’t seem to be a clear hierarchy of information. As well, with only a headline and no lead paragraph to tell what a post was about, users might be less likely to click and read. Academic libraries serve a busy community, with a broad set of interests. I think they might have to work a little harder than public libraries to adapt social software to their needs. Again, a good way to get in touch with that community would be an RSS feed, but you’d have to work hard to make sure that everyone actually signed up, and be very thoughtful in creating headlines that spoke clearly of their contents.