Blogs and libraries

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Blogs and libraries

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What's a blog--and why should you care as a library leader?

Most of you know what a blog is, so I'll hold the basics--definitions and characteristics--until later.

Why should you care?

You should care about blogs for three different purposes:

  1. For your library: As easy ways to get new content on the web, with the newest automatically appearing first, blogs can serve a number of functions for your library--enhancing publicity and services, reaching new audiences and, in some cases, making it faster and easier to do something you already do.
  2. For your own thoughts: If you have ideas and experiences worth sharing or want to highlight what you've seen elsewhere, you can start your own blog. Quite a few library leaders (directors and other kinds of leaders) have done so, and some people have become library thought leaders through blogging.
  3. For ideas and awareness: If you're not already following some blogs within the library field and elsewhere, you probably should be. It's a painless way to tap into a wide variety of ideas and find valuable new tools--and, with aggregators,[1] you can monitor quite a few blogs easily and rapidly.

For library purposes, think about situations where there's frequently (or infrequently!) something new to communicate on a topic--new books, library events, changes in hours, gaming tournaments, web sites that your patrons may find useful, thoughts on your library and its community, press releases, what have you. Any such case may be a candidate for a blog. Any such case where you want all items to be available, but always want the newest to be most prominent, is a natural candidate for a blog: That's what blogs do.

Why would you want your own blog--either as a director's blog formally connected to the library or as an entirely personal blog? If you write a newspaper column about your library, mirroring the column on a blog reaches a new audience with little or no additional effort or expense. If you have things to say that would interest your staff, your members/patrons, your community at large or other library people, a blog provides a fast, easy way to say them and to get immediate feedback.

Just do it?

It's so easy to start a blog that you may be tempted to just do it--and you may even hear that suggestion. After all, a few minutes at Wordpress.com or Blogger[2] and you have a live, free blog. (Hosting your own blog takes a little longer but doesn't necessarily cost any more.)

And, for that matter, you don't really even need to get familiar with the writing-and-editing interfaces of your blog software, although you'll probably want to. You can literally create all your posts within Word2007 or other programs with blog publishing capabilities.

All you need is a blog name, enough of an eye to choose a "look" (a template--Blogger and WordPress have a wide range to choose from), enough awareness to make sure you have spam filtering set, and you're in the blogging business.

Not quite that simple

For a personal blog, it may be that simple. Start it, and if you find you really didn't have much to say, you can always delete it or stop posting. If you haven't publicized it, chances are nobody will notice that you've stopped.

For a library blog, though, a little more consideration may make sense:

  • If you publicize a blog and it goes for long periods with no new items, it makes the library look sloppy or moribund.
  • If you don't publicize a blog, nobody will be aware of it and it won't do anybody any good.

That doesn't mean you need an extended multimonth planning process or a blogging task force. It does mean that you should think through a couple of things before you start a blog that's officially part of your library and its web presence:

  • Purpose: There's nothing wrong with a multipurpose library blog--particularly in a smaller library--but you should define the general purpose of a blog before you start it. That may help guide your choice of name and even look.
  • Followthrough: You should have clear commitments to prepare entries for the blog, frequently enough to make sense for your community, for long enough to give the blog a fair trial. I'd suggest a commitment for at least six months of posts. Frequency depends on the size of your library and nature of the post, but the blog should be active enough to make your library look as vibrant as it actually is. On the other hand, except for functional blogs such as new materials lists or mirrors of newspaper columns, you probably shouldn't aim for a fixed frequency; posts should appear when they're appropriate, not only when it's time.
  • Publicity: You do need to let people know about the blog, unless it's an invisible blog (e.g., an events blog that automatically shows up on your home page). While blogging can increase your web presence in unexpected ways, as web search engines tend to index blog posts, you won't gain a community audience without letting them know the blog's there.
  • Starting small: Don't overthink library blogs. That can lead to establishing half a dozen different blogs (or many more!) before you've determined that blogs work well within your community. It's not a given...but it is pretty much a given that one lively blog will serve your library better than half a dozen rarely-updated blogs.

It's easy to add more blogs. It's a little more difficult to shut down blogs that don't work, unless a dying blog ends with a link to a new and better blog--or with a post that explains why the blog has ceased and what other service takes its place.

You should shut down a blog that isn't working, with an appropriate ending message and, if possible, link. Shutting down a minor blog and adding the content to a more widely-read blog? That's easy: A final post can say what's happening and link users to the retained blog. Ending your blogging experiment entirely? That's a little more difficult...and maybe you should see why the blog isn't working before you give up.

Library-related blogs

There are probably thousands of blogs written by people in libraryland--sometimes called the biblioblogosphere or liblogs (the term I prefer). There are almost certainly more than a thousand English-language liblogs, not including official library blogs.

  • One list of library-related blogs is part of LISWiki. You can add your own blog to this wiki--and you should note if you discontinue the blog. (This list also includes school library blogs, national library blogs, special library blogs and association blogs, and links to lists of academic and public library blogs.)
  • There's a spreadsheet with information on 213 "midrange" library blogs, as of mid-2006, here, but it's somewhat out of date. (Later this year or early next, a much larger spreadsheet with more than 500 library blogs will appear and will be referenced in this article.)

Library blogs

Many libraries have blogs of various sorts--more than 500 English-language blogs when I did two surveys in 2007, certainly more than that by now.

Blog basics

Blog software provides extremely easy web publishing and lightweight content management--but that's also true of wiki software, and the two are quite different. (See Blog or wiki--which tool to use? for some of the differences.)

Definitions

A blog is a web-based set of individual posts, by one individual or a defined group, initially presented to readers in reverse chronological order--that is, newest first.

That's it--although a fair number of blog gurus (not in libraryland) try to add more in order to narrow the field.

Let's break down that definition:

  • Web-based: It's not a blog if it's not on the web, although a blog may be limited to an intranet or password-protected.
  • Set of individual posts: You can start a blog with one post, but if there are never any more, you don't have a blog--you have a website. But it's also significant that posts are individual--not just a growing stream of writing, but a series of individual (and separately-viewable) posts.
  • By one individual or a defined group: Most blogs are written by one person. Some have a small group of known contributors. In almost every case, each post's authorship is known explicitly or implicitly.
  • Initially presented...in reverse chronological order: Virtually every blog's home page shows a stream of posts, starting with the most recent post and proceeding backward in time, usually limited to either a given number of posts or a given time period.
  • To readers: Blogs have writers and readers--they're a form of publishing, not social networking as such. A blog in which every reader can also contribute and modify other people's contributions is, in essence, an odd wiki.

Other elements you might see in definitions of blogs--and why I'm leaving them out:

  • Blog is short for web log: Initially true, and early web logs were just that: logs of websites visited and worth noting. Some very early bloggers believe that proper blogs are still annotated links to other websites. Most contemporary bloggers would disagree, and many blogs have relatively few hyperlinks. "Link blogs" and "link posts" are now a special category of blog or post, not the norm.
  • A blog is a web site: Usually true, but not always. A blog can be embedded in another website (e.g., LISNews includes blogs by dozens of its registered users) or used only to feed into another website (e.g., current-events listings that appear within a library's home page).
  • A blog is a website built using blog software: Usually true--but some blogs use custom-built software and some websites built using blog software (particularly WordPress) are fundamentally not blogs.
  • A blog is a web site that contains an online personal journal...: That's what Merriam-Webster OnLine says, and it's simply wrong. Many blogs are written by more than one person. Many library blogs are neither personal nor journals.
  • A blog consists of dated entries: Usually true, but not always--and even if dates are provided, they're not always prominent.
  • Blog entries are made in journal style: Meaningless--and blogs can consist of anything from formal articles, footnotes included, to unannotated lists.
  • A blog is a frequent, chronological publication..: The inclusion of frequent or periodic in many definitions of blogs may have been relevant at one point, when people visited blogs directly--but it's largely meaningless today, unless you define frequent very loosely. There have been important blogs that were updated once a month or even less often. (If you see typically updated daily in a definition of blogs, you're dealing with a seriously outdated definition. A small minority of library-related blogs are updated daily.)
  • Blogs allow comments and trackbacks: Usually but by no means always true for comments, somewhat less commonly true for trackbacks (which are indications on a post that someone else has blogged about that post, linking to the other blog). Some blogs by library people don't allow comments, and many library blogs used for purposes such as new book lists don't allow comments. Some bloggers disallow trackbacks because of spam and other problems. (Note that some self-proclaimed blog authorities say that if a site doesn't accept comments, it's not a blog. They're wrong. Others say that it's not a blog if every post doesn't contain links to other sites. They're wrong too.)

Characteristics

Meredith Farkas' Social Software in Libraries--which includes good discussions of why you might want to create and read blogs--lists these characteristics of most (but not all) blogs (I've paraphrased and sometimes added to the explanations):

  • Archives - Listings of past blog entries, usually organized by date, sometimes also accessible by category.
  • Dated entries - Almost all blogs have date stamps either above or at the end of each entry, and usually time stamps at the end--but there are exceptions.
  • Permalinks - Almost all blogs provide direct links to individual entries, either through the post title, the time stamp, the word "Permalink" or some other mechanism. In all cases, the permalink will appear as a hyperlink. In many cases (but by no means all), the resulting URL will be meaningful: It will include not only the blog name but the post title.
  • Reverse-chronological postings - The only essentially-universal blog characteristic: Newest posts appear first.
  • Two- or three-column format - Most blogs have a wide column for posts and one or two columns on one or both sides of the screen for other stuff--archives, "about" pages, links to other blogs ("blogrolls"), categories or tags, etc.

As Farkas notes, the following characteristics are somewhat less common:

  • Categories - Predefined (by the blogger) topics assigned to posts to make them easier to retrieve. A post can have many or no categories. Some blogs use tags or labels instead of categories.
  • Comments - Reader feedback attached directly to a post. All competent blogging software supports comments, but some bloggers choose to turn off comments.
  • Search - Most blogs include a search box to support full-text searches for previous posts.
  • TrackBacks (sometimes called Linkbacks) - Indications that some other blog has referenced a post. Some blogs will display trackbacks along with comments. Some bloggers disable trackback display because it's a known source of indirect spam.

Software and hosts

In addition to Wordpress.com and Blogger, there are other free blog hosts such as LiveJournal and paid hosting services such as TypePad.

If you're hosting your own blog or have an established host, free open-source blog software includes WordPress, b2evolution and others, including Movable Type (not the "Pro" version), which became open source relatively recently.

Other terms

Some of the other terms you'll encounter in the blog universe.

RSS, Atom, feed

Three different terms relating to the same thing--a mechanism that allows readers to have posts pushed from blogs to something else by subscribing to the feed, most commonly an aggregator (which see). Note that many web pages other than blogs have feeds. As for the meaning of RSS, there are several versions--but mostly it and Atom are both varieties of feeds.

  • Advantages of a feed: The reader sees your new posts when they're ready, without having to check your blog periodically, which allows the reader to monitor many more blogs and other sources and allows you to post less often without losing readers. Also, if you've used a "stylish" template with low contrast between text and background (or, worse, light text on a dark background), the reader gets your posts in ordinary text form.
  • Disadvantages of a feed: Readers are somewhat less likely to comment on posts and even to see comments (although some feeds note comments). Readers may not see changes in your posts--most feeds won't re-feed them. Readers don't typically see all the wonders of your blog design. You can try to force readers to come to your blog by having the feed only send the first portion of each post--but for many readers, that's a great way to get unsubscribed.

Aggregator

Either a website, standalone software, or portion of some other website or software that gathers your feeds and displays them appropriately. Bloglines and Google Reader are the best known and probably most widely used website aggregators.

Blogroll

A list of blogs that you read and believe others should pay attention to, typically displayed as a set of linked blog names in one margin of your blog. These days, an alternate way to present a blogroll is to link to a public Bloglines list (or similar public lists from other aggregators). Blogrolls are much less common in liblogs these days (and, I suspect, in blogs in general) than they were a few years ago.

Link blogs or linkblogs

Blogs (or posts within blogs) that amount to nothing more than links to other websites or, these days, to people's delicious additions. (Note: what was del.icio.us is now delicious.com.)

Microblogging

"Blogging" via Twitter or a similar system, where messages are done on the fly and typically limited to 140 characters or so.

There's some discussion as to whether tweets (Twitter messages) are really equivalent to blog posts--but that discussion gets to questions of what's "properly" a blog. You could relate microblogging to blogging in somewhat the same way that blogs relate to formal articles:

  • Blog posts are typically shorter and much more informal than articles, with considerably less editorial review (if any) and narrower scopes, but more rapid communication and easier responses.
  • Tweets are much shorter than most blog posts (except for linkblogs), with no editorial review and no real formality--and allow even easier responses than blog posts.

Some bloggers have, or have had, their tweets show up on their blogs--either as a sidebar or as posts. Most such cases (at least in the library field) are now in sidebars, which don't typically feed through to aggregators.

Others?

  • Please add or suggest other terms you believe should be here.

Notes

  1. ↑ An aggregator is a program or website that gathers new posts from any number of blogs and other sources that you select, letting you keep up with new items from all of them without visiting each one individually. Bloglines and Google Reader are probably the two best-known of dozens of aggregators.
  2. ↑ There are other free blog hosts such as LiveJournal, but these two are well-known, literally host millions of blogs and hundreds of library-related blogs, and offer a wide range of templates. Blogger is owned by Google. WordPress.com is part of Automattic, which produces the open source WordPress blogging software at WordPress.org.

by Walt Crawford, originally published August 29, 2008, updated September 10, 1008

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