Calling all libraries with blogs for internal communication
Oct 14th, 2007 by Karen
Hey readers,
I’m writing show final chapters for a book I’m co-authoring on blogging in libraries and needs some help. I’m looking for good examples of blogs being used for internal purposes in libraries: Distributing news, gathering ideas, holdings discussions, etc. Typically the kind of blogs I’m looking for is part of an organization’s intranet and therefore not publicly available. Which is why I need your help. If your library is using blogs for internal communication purposes in an innovative or interesting way, please contact me or add a comment to this post. If I need more information about the blog, I’ll be in touch to ask further questions and maybe request a few screen captures. Thanks in advance for everyone’s help!
The UTS Library uses a blog on the homepage of the Intranet to provide new, events & alerts.
We replaced a paper based internal newsletter (”Grapevine”) with a blog (”Grapevine 2.0″) about a year and a half ago. It’s a mixture of fun & social, formal announcements, meeting reports, news, links to kewl stuff, etc. The blog is for all staff in Computing and Library Services at the University of Huddersfield.
There’s a few screengrabs in this presentation (slides 41 to 44): http://www.slideshare.net/daveyp/n-a-g2007/41
I am using internal blogs to post “Library Interesting Finds” — web sites of general interest to researchers here. They stay searchable and people can subscribe by rss if they wish. I also populate a couple of other blogs specifically on particular topics. These are republished on web sites of those groups.
I used a blog to teach an summer long, online class to library staff. I can send you the link if you’re interested. I was able to group the databases by subject and have staff look at each one in depth. And, because they did it on their own (as opposed to a “lecture class,”) I think that got a tremendous amount out of it. It was a great way for staff to learn at their own pace and it was very successful!
We use WordPress for a service we call “TripNotes”…where librarians report back to staff on conferences and/or workshops they’ve attended. You can view it at: http://timesync.gmu.edu/tripnotes/
We have several inter-library blogs that are viewable by anyone. The most used one is our professional development blog, http://blog.zsr.wfu.edu/pd , a lot like the “TripNotes” one mentioned above.
I work for an academic law library… we have a blog on our intranet that we’re using to track all of our database trials. The reference librarians can post their reviews or discoveries in the comments and we’ll have an archive of the discussions if we decide to revisit ones that we don’t pick up.
We have an internal wiki for our strategic plan project, but most people are still getting used to it, so the usage varies by comfort level. The blog is a little more straightforward, though not everyone likes having to leave their e-mail to track something else.
We’ve had an installation of Wordpress-Mu on an internal network wired to our central Lotus Notes system since early summer 2007; there’s been all sorts of interesting internal communication about things NYPL- and librarianship-related bubbling up since its super-soft launch, so much so that we’ve decided to leave those blogs internal-only, to enable unfettered internal discussion, while exploring other ideas for public-facing blogs.
We’ve been using an internal blog for over a year and for different purposes. First it started to be used as a means for sharing our discoveries on innovative OPACs / new searching tools / web 2.0 / etc. The key idea was not to spam our colleagues mailbox and to be able to search easily using the blog search engine when we needed to find older information. Then we expanded these subjects to things connected to the fact that we’re a school library : news and tips on information literacy, plagiarism, copyright, useful sources for researchers, etc.
After a while we thought that it could also be used to identify what we considered as the best library websites as well as share / comment on librarian blog posts that seemed to convey innovative ideas. This led to a complete make-over of our website ! Now it’s also used as a repository for our meeting minutes and personal reports. We’ve created a category for each and are able to track down what has been done and measure our progress during the year.
We like it so much that we’re thinking to launch a blog (in French, we’re a French business school ;-)) on what we think the missions of a librarian 2.0 should be, with in-depth articles derived from what we write in our internal blog.
Like Wally at GMU, the Auburn Library has a “Conferences” blog for reporting on trips and conferences. Ours however is on our intranet and not publicly available.