Working blogs into the library structure
Submitted by jerdman2 on Tue, 2007-02-13 21:16.
This blog is a reflection of just watching the screencasts. Perhaps some of my first thoughts and questions will be addressed later...
I work in a library of around 100 workers. Each department runs fairly independently with just the basic form of project/activity sharing. I like the idea of using a blog on the internet for our patrons to have one place to get information on all the going ons of the library, but how to get the rest of the library involved? I believe the Public Services crew (broken down into sub departments) would be interested, but there is also the communications department with their separate website and the collection development/acquisitions people, etc. You have to keep in mind the politics of the library culture.If all goes well, everyone would have a blog of current information that would all be located in the central web location, maybe with links back too the departmental pages. But this is not an ideal world. Does this mean that the "social librarian" of the library will have to keep up abreast of all the departmental library webpages and what is not listed on the webpages to update the blog?
Also, admin would probably want some sort of policy listed for any comments or contributions from the library users. Are there resources that will cover this aspect?
I am a fan of the idea of keeping a blog and do not think the time factor should be an issue. It's having the whole of the library buy into the process that I think is a problem. At least with blogs.
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One way forward would be to
One way forward would be to have blogs for each department and then consolidate them onto a single web-page using their feeds ... Melissa Rethlefsen's screencast (scheduled for next week) is a really good introduction to how to do this (I've been recommending it to a few people recently).
In our chat today, we were talking about how Ann Arbor really sets a standard for which we can all strive, with staff blogging peppered throughout their site: http://www.aadl.org/ has links, including to acquisitions / cataloguing and media relations http://www.aadl.org/catalog
Best,
Anne
Also, admin would probably
Also, admin would probably want some sort of policy listed for any comments or contributions from the library users. Are there resources that will cover this aspect?
Great question! I can't point to any specific policies, but from my conversations with blogging libraries/librarians, I've heard that the following are "issues" to keep in mind:
- profanity in comments
- comments that single out specific staff members (by name) - especially when these comments are negative/derogatory
- comment spam - an obvious issue, but one that can be easily handled by implementing comment moderation (i.e. comments have to be approved before being published)
Anyone else know of any library blog commenting policies? Do share!
One thing we've struggled
One thing we've struggled with here is administrations concern that people might say bad things about the library in comments. The idea behind comments on a blog is so that you can get feedback from real users. While it is important to have some kind of policy that deals with spam, and profanity; it is also important to make people feel like the comments is a space where their contributions will be valued. Otherwise you may end up suppressing the "conversation" that the comments are suppose to allow for. It is a fine balance.
However, one thing I've seen done with both comments and traditional comment cards in libraries is to make them moderated and "clean-up" comments that had good content/questions but had inappropriate material in them (ie criticized a particular staff person, had profanity etc). In a blog you can do this by moderating the comments and if you see one that has relevant content but has some stuff in it you wouldn't want to push through as is, write a blog post about the content instead, mentioning the fact that the post was a result of feedback.