New(ish) Library Bloggers Strut Their Stuff
January 31st, 2005Since LISblogsource is officially kaput, I figured that I’d mention a few of the new(ish) library weblogs that I have come across over the past month or two (many are older than that - I’m just a bit slow on the uptake).
I found these 3 through my ego feed (well, the last one was linked through) on PubSub (Do you have an ego feed? I do!) with mentions of my cornucopia post last week. These posts relate to using internal weblogs as communication devices at the reference desk:
+ Chad F. Boeninger, who blogs at Library Voice, writes about his experiences:
“Overall, the Reference Blog has been a huge success. Searchable, organized information can be found easily in our blog. Reference staff are freely contributing to the blog, so it truly is a resource of collective knowledge. Our student assistants receive the email notifications, and their being in the loop helps them to serve our patrons better. Our blog serves as a knowledgebase for our department and is used as such. Countless times I have heard a colleague say, “Oh, yeah, I remember reading about that in the blog.” The colleague can quickly find the information and answer the question quickly. Or others often say, “I really think this should be in the blog.” Five minutes later, there is a post about that particular issue. Being able to create, disseminate, and find information quickly is a beautiful thing.”
+ Meredith Gorran Farkas, who blogs at Information Wants to Be Free, writes:
“During one of my interviews this week, I asked the interviewers what some of their biggest challenges were at their library. One of the challenges they mentioned was keeping all the staff on the same page about policy changes and news when people worked varying shifts. This is a common issue in libraries. The fines for late videos change, a new printer is bought with new procedures for troubleshooting it, or a meeting is rescheduled, and it’s difficult to disseminate the news to all of the staff. When I worked in a public library, there was a memo pad that contained all of the important news that we needed to know. But it was easy to forget to look at the notebook, things were sometimes written in illegible handwriting, and it was difficult to make changes to or to link new news to older related news. I always thought it would be great to have something online – an intranet, a blog, or something – where the news would be easy to change and disseminate, and would be accessible from any computer.”
+ Rochelle A. Mazar, who has a great title for her blog (”The Trials and Tribulations of a Subversive Librarian) wrote about this issue a few weeks ago:
“Most organizations already do something else in place of a group blog. They send mass emails. Hundreds of mass emails a week, which generally clutter up mailboxes or get deleted. Wouldn’t a blog be better? Rather than spotty archives in people’s email, everyone could have access to ONE keyword-searchable, date- and time- stamped archive. Rather than carry on a conversation on a listserv, forcing all staff to get our witty repartee via email, staff with questions could post comments and have them answered by the poster or anyone else with information. I suggested complex, threaded comments for educational blogs, and I would definitely suggest them in this context as well. With threaded comments, questions could be asked, answered, and archived in a forum open to all staff without clogging up inboxes.”
I’m going to start discussing wikis more as communication tools at the reference desk. I have been more and more impressed with the ability with the communication of a small group of people using a wiki (maybe 10-15 or less - I’m not sure yet). We’re also going to try to use wikis for communication amongst the PLA bloggers at future conferences. Even more reason to take Will Richardson out for coffee at CIL.