I was as excited as anyone when I saw that librariesinteract had launched, plugging the yawning gap that had appeared in the world of Australian library blogs (the Australiobiblioblogosphere? The biblioblogosouthernhemisphere?). The need for ambitious, inclusive, widely read projects is obvious.
What I have been thinking about, though, is the application of blogs for smaller projects and addressed to more specific readerships.
MPOW is sending me and my colleague Sarah to ALIA 06, and we figured that a blog might be a good way to provide instant interaction with workmates in faraway Sydney. After all, the traditional method of reporting back after the event is pretty unhelpful – a monologue delivered after the event as item 3.2 on the agenda, with the write-up bunged on the intranet and never looked at again. Any idea what your colleagues got up to at ALIA 04? Me neither.
The way we see it, our conference blog has the following characteristics that are different to most blogs:
1) Focussed readership – our target market is specifically library staff at MPOW. It’s a way of breaking down the barrier of time and distance in order to make ALIA 06 meaningful to the library as a whole. (Anybody is welcome to join in the conversation, though!)
2) Short term – we expect the blog to be wound up shortly after the conference
3) Gradual build-up with a burst of intense activity during the conference itself
4) Archived in a meaningful way*
Has anybody else looked at using blogs in this short-term focussed way at their library? What kind of projects have they been used for? Has it been useful? Are there any pitfalls we should look out for?
We’re looking forward to seeing how the blog works out. You can keep up with it at http://blogs.usyd.edu.au/aliaconference/ Maybe we’ll be presenting about it at the next library conference we get to?
*Probably the Sydney eScholarship Repository, which is an interesting project itself. Come and hear about it if you are coming to ALIA 06.
Feed
August 9, 2006 at 19:54
At Bond University we have used a blog to communicate with our community on the implementation of an institutional repository. This blog was a bit of an experiment in the use of blogs for projects and to discover the features of Wordpress. It has a small readership, but there are a few subscribers who then spread the word (or link) to their colleagues.
Focussed readership – Bond Community
Short term – once the IR is operational and widely known amongst staff I doubt that the blog will continue.
Pitfalls – well, I guess the lack of awareness about blogs generally, or at least the preconception that they are just online personal diaries, and the generally low take up of feed readers has meant that this communication source is underutilized.
However, it has been a useful place to store information about the project including milestones achieved and about IR’s and scholarly communication. So as we introduce more academics to the IR we can also point them to useful resources.
I’d encourage the use of blogs in this way – but for best effect they need to be coupled with an educational approach for communities that have only a passing interest in weblogs and haven’t “got” RSS yet.
Implementation Project – epublications@bond
August 9, 2006 at 20:51
Maybe I have a local record for the tiniest micro-blog with a purpose. I wanted to pitch to my managers my “use social tools to learn about social tools” project idea. It later became the MULTA project ( http://multa.murdoch.edu.au ).
I was working at home and couldn’t be bothered using VPN to remotely log into work, or to create a WORD document as an email attachment. I presented it to them using something that looked better and was easier to do…a blog with just 5 entries at blogger.com. While it looked a bit slick, it was just pure laziness on my part. The entries were:
* Project aims and outline
* Physical format of project info. resources
* Participants
* Blog posts
* Timetable
It lives at: http://www.multa.blogspot.com/.
Can’t remember where, but I read yesterday about a librarian who reviews books by creating a new blogger.com blog about each one and has over 100 separate blogs.
August 11, 2006 at 14:27
I used a Wordpress blog for periods during a couple of projects but I haven’t used one from beginning to end. I found it was very useful in keeping a record of what happened and why. I think that it would also help in putting together a case study at the end of a project. If you have the inclination to make regular reports (even if only to yourself) you can really gather some useful material.
I also used a wiki during a project as a collaborative space for creating project documentation. This didn’t go so well, though the problem was more to do with the culture of that particular project group.
And that’s it – some groups love these sorts of tools and others don’t. I think that is the main pitfall – having an expectation that people will necessarily warm to the tools.
I remember reading about a distributed library that used blogs as part of a strategic planning process. This seemed like a good idea. I like the approach of putting up some ideas for discussion & seeing what comes back.