Family Man Librarian

In an earlier posting I mentioned that I was going to a session on library blogs as marketing tools held at the Greater Cincinnati Library Consortium (GCLC). I also stated that I didn’t think I’d learn much from the session, which in retrospect sounds kinda snotty, and I didn’t mean it that way. What I meant was that I had already been delving into the blogging world quite a bit of late and had a pretty good knowledge base already. Turns out I did learn some things at today’s session, which is always a good thing

The presenter, Darlene Fichter of the University of Saskatchewan, did a good job of covering quite a bit of ground. For some reason, my boss and I didn’t realize that it was a videoconference presentation, but actually, aside from a few glitches, Darlene did as good a job via videoconference as if she had been there in person. I particularly appreciated her emphasis on establishing an editor and/or editorial guidelines for library blogs to which more than one person contributes. This is exactly the kind of thing I have set up for my library and her point helped to solidify some ideas I’ve had about how best to operate the whole thing. Darlene also emphasized the need to establish a particular “voice” or “niche” for a weblog. I’ve heard that before but her mention of it again helped me to think more about what “voice” or “niche” I would want my library’s weblog to have. She also pointed out the flexibility of a weblog in terms of being able to use the information posted to it in various ways. For instance, the output of a weblog could be in email form, delivered via a newsreader, presented as a static webpage, or fed into an institutional portal environment. The latter point in particular struck a chord with me because my institution is introducing a portal environment beginning with the fall semester. Overall this was a very thorough and well presented session and I’m glad we drove all the way over to Cincinnati to attend it. And an added bonus was Cincinnati itself; really a beautiful city with interesting homes and buildings built up on a bluff high above the river.

As an aside, I had a wireless laptop with me at the time and was surreptitiously looking at Library Stuff and some other weblogs to which I subscribe. Darlene mentioned Kansas City Public Library’s RSS feeds, and just a few seconds later, lo and behold, I saw Steven Cohen’s post at Library Stuff about that very thing. Talk about convergence!