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I was fortunate enough to be a part of the closing plenary at the Medical Library Association Annual Meeting last week. David Rothman, Melissa Rethlefsen, Bart Ragon and I presented on Web 2.0 tools and participated in a panel discussion (with Mark Funk, awesome MLA past president) after the formal presentations. It was a great time! I’ve given talks to smaller groups of medical/health librarians in the past, but being around so many of them at once just confirmed what I always sort of knew: medical librarians rock!

If you’re a member of MLA, the whole session was webcast and should be archived over at MLANET. Also, David’s got all four presentations up in one handy post. A hearty thanks to the MLA for having me and to the stellar session planners for making it all come together so seamlessly (and enjoyably)!

Since Michael set the bar high with his fancy graphics, I tried to follow suit. Here’s a look at the number of library blogs in 2005 & 2006 (note: “internal” shows up as zero in 2005 because I wasn’t tracking internal blogs when I ran these numbers last year):

You will notice that the numbers are slightly lower than the ones Michael reported. That’s because this graph reflects the number of institutions that are blogging, as opposed to the number of library blogs in existence. Since a number of libraries have multiple blogs (news blogs, teen blogs, etc.), I thought a more accurate representation of the spread of blogs in libraryland would be to look at how many institutions are publishing blogs (rather than how many library blogs are being published). Make sense?

In preparation for this post, I undertook a long overdue cleanup of the wiki (sort of related aside: still no wiki spam! None! UGH. A day after I posted this, the vandals hit! I’m monitoring the situation for now but might have to move to login-to-edit. Stay tuned), cleaning up duplicates, moving blogs to appropriate categories, checking URLs, and generally getting the house in order. In the process of checking URLs, I came across a number of blogs that have not been updated in a few months (I defined “a few months” as 6 months or more) and I decided that rather than delete those blogs, I’d keep them on the list and append a “last updated” notice to the link. My rationale here was that even though a blog is no longer updated, there might still be value in retaining it since it could provide good ideas for anyone exploring the list for possible uses of blogs in their institution.

However, as I ran the numbers for the graph above, I knew it would be misleading if I didn’t indicate just how many of those institutions had abondoned their blogs (some were clearly abandoned for a reason and the last post usually spells out that reason; others look like they simply lost steam). Here’s a look at the same numbers again (2006), with “inactive” blogs indicated:

Not extraordinary numbers, by any means, but numbers worth noting for the inevitable questions they beg: why have 16% of public libraries abandoned their blogs? Why do school libraries fair better when it comes to, what shall we call it… blog longevity? I’m sure anyone who has ever done a presentation or written an article on blogs and libraries touts the format for being easy to maintain, so why, then, have 12% of academic libraries let their blogs go stale? Of course, we already know some of the answers to these questions (lack of staff/time/buy-in, etc.), but what this exercise has crystallized for me is the simple fact that, while blogs provide a good solution for some libraries, they aren’t the perfect solution for every institution.

Another session with scattered notes, but mostly because I was just sucked right into the energy Rochelle & Jason generated for the topic! They did a great tag-team job of presenting their content (no powerpoint!), their enthusiasm was palpable. They also recorded the session, more details + the mp3 are here. Since you can listen to the session for yourself, most of the notes below are my commentary.

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- Rochelle & Jason have funding to build a blogging tool for higher ed
- plan to build the platform independently (open source) and then integrate into BlackBoard
- both feel that there is no tool designed for higher ed
- they spoke a bit about some of the features that will be included, keep an eye on metaphorica.net (their collaboartive site) for details.

blogging & pedagogy
- we already know that learning doesn’t just happen in the classroom. Blogging provides a venue for student reflection when the “a ha! moment” (Rochelle’s words) does happen, wherever/whenever that may be.
- both speakers also mentioned the “ownership” students feel over their blogs and their online presence (customization, avatars, etc. contribute to this).
- student blogs foster reflection on not just the content but the learning process, allowing them to engage in that process (as well as the learning processes of their classmates).
- it’s not about the technology, that just enables. it’s about the pedagogy!
- Jason mentioned a couple of techniques he uses to actually get his students to blog: he requires x number of words before class, then students are organized into groups of 6-10 and they go away and read each other posts and are encouraged to comment on a significant number of posts. They also have to respond to the comments they receive on their blogs.
- “curriculum of the hallway” (Jason’s words) – what a great way to put it! Because, yes, learning does happen outside of the classroom.
- both speakers also mentioned that they don’t prep their students in “online etiquette”, they learn this on their own (probably even more effective).

So, once that was settled, my next consideration was: how can I make the list more self-sustaining? At the moment, people still have to email me their link to get their library blog on the list (so 1.0!) — how could I set it up so that people could add their links themselves and still not lose functionality (categorization and RSS being the two most important features in my book)? If you’re thinking “wiki”, you’re right! Say hello to the new Blogging Libraries Wiki. While there is still some tweaking to be done over the next few days (navigation, about page, help page, etc.), all the links have been transferred from the old blogrolling lists, so it’s fully up to date. And I’ve posted a note on the old page so if you’ve linked to that page, your link won’t be totally broken.

A few details about the wiki:

• it’s a MediaWiki wiki which was super easy to install, thanks to Dreamhost, my domain host. Dreamhost does one-click installs & upgrades of all sorts of goodies (WordPress too), so it was a painless process. The customization took a bit more figuring out, but thanks to the excellent documentation, that was relatively painless too.
• right now, the category pages are wide open for anyone to edit. I thought I’d start out that way and monitor the spam/vandalism level before considering login-only edits. Ideally, I’d like to stick with open editing so as to not discourage potential posters from adding their links (the fewer barriers to participation, the better!), but I’m realistic. We’ll see.

• The principles of blog design and usability and how to put those principles to work on your library blog.
• What makes good blog content and how to write content and style guidelines for multi-author blogs.
• Taking RSS further, including how to incorporate RSS feeds into your website and building reading lists with OPML.
• Marketing your blog and RSS feeds.
• Social bookmarking tools such as del.icio.us, Furl, and Flickr and their use in libraries.
• Podcasting for content-delivery.

[Technorati tag: cil2006]

Christina spoke about the implementation of blogs on the APL Intranet, starting with their first, less-successful efforts, followed by their current implementation (much more successful, from the sounds of it).The institution decided to implement a blog for a few reasons:

• their need for a newsletter
• their intranet portal design was inflexible & they didn’t have in-house tech support anymore.
• the institution is moving to all digital/online and they decided that they needed new communications channels for their large, distributed campus.

The main blog highlights publications by APL researchers and replaced a print kiosk which selectively showcased these publications. With the publication of the blog, they now provide a comprehensive listing of publications, all neatly archived and categorized. The blog also makes use of their e-resources (link to full text) and provides nice ego-boost.Christina mentioned that their blogs don’t get a lot of comments (consistent with her knowledge of internal blogs at other institutions) but the posts do result in phone calls, emails, and chats in the hallway. I found this curious. The real-life conversations that the blog provokes clearly shows that it is being read and used.

She closed out her presentation by talking about what the future holds for blogs at APL: the potential for topical blogs, and internal lab-wide summit on social software (an enterprise-wide effort to bring people together — the people who are doing blogs, wikis, etc. – neat!), and finally the possible hosting of other department blogs.

And finally, words of advice from lessons learned:

• do the best you can to get a stable host
• do not assume customers and IT know/get blogs
• back up content and consider ways to export/import posts
• post contact information all over the blog
• get it advertized on the pages your customers visit, i.e.:: consider the “start page” of your customers’ browsers. Where are they starting from? Find out and get a link to your blog posted there!

Susan titled her portion of the session, “so you want to start a blog or if you build it they may not come.” She didn’t use any A/V at all (no powerpoint!) and delivered more of a traditional conference paper, which was a refreshing change (everything old is new again?!). Susan talked about the use of blogs to serve the business students/faculty at Emory and outlined a whole bunch of questions that are important to ask in the blog planning stages. Here are the questions that I scribbled down:

• who is the audience? What is the benefit to them?
• why was it important that they publish a blog?
• What do your colleagues think a blog is? The librarians got it; the users, not so much.
• how will the blog be different from the prod/services we already offer? Does it add value?
• are you prepared for the commitment and who will be responsible for keeping it current?
• what is the expected ROI? How will you know you’re getting bang for your buck? At what point will you cut your losses and run?
• what do you hope to gain/learn from the experience?
• what are the users’ expectations?
• is it valid to create a blog just because it’s something the librarian(s) want to “try out”?

Clara had just about five minutes for her portion of the talk, but she did a great job touching on her use of blogs, both as part of her association work and library instruction. Some interesting take-aways for me:

• teaching students about the ethics of blogging
• use a blog in lieu of presentation software.
• use a blog in lieu of handouts too (excellent!) — it provides continued communication outside of the classroom.

[Technorati tag: cil2006]

• Kathy reports that she’s had excellent support for the blog, from the administration, teachers, and students.
• Comments enabled! And they’re being used!
• Kathy has set up some excellent information pages on the blog (how to blog, RSS, and Podcasts) and reports that teachers are using these pages for more info.
• Varied and interesting content, from web 2.0 tools for collaboration, to class assignments, to quirky news, to school social events.
• Categories for each of the school departments.

Brilliant. Way to go, Kathy!

An interesting thought. I’m not overly fond of the term “technology evangelist”, but I guess I do a lot of that, both at my institution, and as part of the Web 2.0/Library 2.0 talks that I do at other institutions. But for me, and I suspect for a lot of other people in our library world who have been talking about these technologies for a while, the really crucial question I encourage people to ask themselves first is “what need is this going to fulfil or what problem will this fix?” When we implemented a blog at my institution two years ago, it was to fulfill a couple of really specific needs:

• we needed a better way to archive our news stories
• we needed to provide more people with an easy way to add news content (without having to know html)
• we needed an easy way to repurpose news content on the rest of our site

So, yeah, not hard to guess that a blog would fulfill these needs. We went through the same exercise before we implemented our IM reference service last year: we knew that a large number of our users worked virtually, yet we had limited services to assist them (e-mail only). We also knew that most of them were on MSN (as evidenced by a glance at any given public workstation in the library!), so IM reference just made sense.

You can probably see where I’m going with this. There certainly is a cool-factor associated with these “shiny new toys”, but implementing them for the sake of their “shininess” makes no sense. If your library’s cool-factor goes up as a result of implementing any of these tools, that’s a nice incidental benefit (by the way, I don’t think my library’s cool-factor budged when we implemented our blog/rss feeds. When we implemented our IM service? Through the roof. If that means our users like it and will use it, I’ll take it. Is that why we implemented it? Of course not).