dashing through the slow

Possible uses for blogs. It's really a silly thing to even contemplate. There are already zillions of blogs. When you explore them you find that it's an incestuous set but it's like any other set -- there are stars and there's everyone else. And that's well worth considering: what makes a blog successful? Name recognition? Lots of readers? Lots of commenters? Surely in the education business we'd like to be interested in the 2-way communication -- the commenters.

Many blogs but not all are highly focused. If you're an expert in your field, people are interested in what you're doing, how you're doing it, and what you think of everything else in the field. The best blogs, measured in any way you want, are well-written. Humor doesn't hurt. Two of the most popular blogs I've seen, in terms of involving a large audience, are Making Light (http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/) and Yarn Harlot (http://www.yarnharlot.ca/blog/). These blogs have a regular readership ("community") and they're vocal. I think that over 100 comments per post is a pretty good indication of success. Item of interest -- the biggest responses are generated by off-topic issues! Think politics and social injustice. (Perhaps I should say perceived social injustice.)

What does this have to do with libraries??? Not much. But. Blogs can take on a life of their own. They are not just the product of one person. The best of them morph and change and reflect the world. If you read the books of P G Wodehouse, you'd never know that a war took place over the course of his career. It's never mentioned in the Wooster and Jeeves stories. That's not what you want from a blog, especially a library blog.

What do we want? Why create a blog? Or what kinds of blogs should we create? The best answer is, just create it and see what happens. We can come up with some highly contrived uses for a blog. I think the thing to remember is that you've got to start somewhere. If you've never used a blog, you won't recognize the perfect use for it when it comes along. You've got to use it enough to be comfortable with it, to even be bored with it, before you can explore what else it might be good for.

I think there would be great utility in an internal library blog, archiving posts created by library employees, for library employees. Ideally this would be a blog with multiple "owners." If we couldn't stand the thought of that much chaos, the Reference group comes to mind as a logical group. What kinds of things might go on a blog like that?

First, there are the "look at this" items. Tag them with the appropriate category or keyword and they're easy to find. Not just new databases or new reference books. When we're looking at websites at other university's libraries, or when we're debating what an information commons should be, a blog might be a good way to get input from multiple people and store it in one place.

Second, there are local "what's new" items. We probably don't need to record the water problems or the elevator malfunctions but it might be nice to know when Leyburn switched to card-access at night. It might be nice to know when certain positions were created or substantially changed, without asking someone to look it up in their paper files.

Third, there are the reports from meetings and trips and workshops and classes. Sometimes these end up on someone's web page. Sometimes they end up in the minutes of a staff meeting. Why not one place where they can be retrieved based on a variety of searches (including where the meeting took place, for example). Certainly the search utility on Groupwise leaves something to be desired.

[Just a few thoughts. I've actually spent a little time trying to organize and edit and rewrite this and I'm still not happy with it.]

Posted by cindy morton at 8:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Hmm. Not sure I have the right Category for this but not sure I want to create a bunch more at this point.

I could envision a blog for Acquisitions. I don't actually know how this stuff is tracked or filed and there may already exist a perfectly good method for doing this. Several weeks ago it came up that we hadn't had a new issue of a particular periodical in a good long while. Wendy talked to me about it and we were inclined to think they'd ceased publication. She called and was told they were just running way behind. [Slight understatement. I think it was nearly a year behind schedule.]

Is that sort of information tracked anywhere? If someone else wondered about this next week or next month, would we have to rely on Wendy remembering she'd placed that call? Or is this stuff put into an Annie record? I have no idea.

If the information was in a blog, any one of us could look it up, presumably by searching on the title fo the journal (which would require that this was correctly entered in the first place). Would this be useful? Might be. It's going to depend on whether and how this information is currently tracked.

And someone would have to decide how this should be organized. Particularly with something new and experimental, I think flexibility would be beneficial. There's no point in documenting everything but it's hard to know what's of value until a certain amount of "stuff" is available.

Posted by cindy morton at 8:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I think I like MovableType. It has some very nice features. We'll see how I feel about the archiving style although the categories and keywords will make the style of archiving much less important. Not to mention searchability.

I've created several additional categories, including nested ones. So now I'll write something about another topic, just so I can see how the multiple categories feature works.

So, there's knitting.
I don't have much time to knit so things take me forever. I learned to knit as a child and have gone through periods of knitting and periods of not knitting. I started again two or three years ago and I vowed that I'd take my time and really make things that fit and are wearable. Mostly I've done that. The current WIP (work in progress), a cabled raglan sweater based on the Hamefarin Raglan, doesn't fit perfectly but I'm tired of messing with it and just want to get it done. There are so many things I want to knit and so little time.

I'm also working on a pair of mohair socks. Well, the yarn is actually a mohair blend. These are either going to be brilliant or a complete disaster.

Posted by cindy morton at 6:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A new tech adventure! Sort of. I've dabbled with blogging via Blogger. I find I don't have much to say these days. In the late 90s (and it feels very strange to say that) I kept an online journal and got a lot of it out of my system. That was an invaluable tool in learning to make and maintain web pages. I'm not quite sure how I'll use a blog but I'm sure use will generate more use.

Already learning things. I don't like the split between "Entry Body" and "Extended Entry." I tend to write at length, off the top of my head. I've never been a good editor or revisor. I suppose I could use this format to force myself to do better but . . . nah.

hen I'm reading blogs I find it a very annoying setup. Generally, I want to read the whole "story" at once. (Have I used up my quota of quotation marks yet?) I don't want to have to keep clicking. Actually, this format does have it's uses. You can present the whole entry on the first page (maybe -- if it's not automatically limited in size) and then include something printable (like a recipe) on the next page. To print the recipe, you don't have to print the entire entry.

Same thing with presenting a lot of pictures. It would be nice to have some introductory text on the first page of the entry, alerting people that the next page has lots of images. I realize most people aren't still using slow dial-up connections but some are.

So, just for the record, I tried entering this text in the "Extended Entry" field, thinking "Entry Body" would automatically abbreviate the entry. What was I thinking? I've since moved the entire entry into the Entry Body field. This should be interesting.

[Man, when will they get spellcheck in these things?]
(Umm, that . . . comment? exposulation? . . . was typed in with actual HTML tags for italics. Because I hadn't noticed the little buttons above this field. Duh. It will be interesting to see which tags work and which don't.

Posted by cindy morton at 6:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)