Across the Web, libraries are finding ways to add value to their online presence through use of a blog. For example, the librarians at Williamsburg Regional Library recently launched Blogging for a Good Book to augment the library's Looking for a Good Book readers' service. From the About page:

Read a new review every day, Monday through Friday! The staff of the Williamsburg Regional Library in Virginia bring you short reviews of books, movies, and more!

Launched in April of 2007, Blogging for a Good Book is the newest facet of the Looking for a Good Book readers' service. A different staff member picks favorite reviews for each different week. Subscribe to our RSS feed to find good reviews, or click on the categories on the righthand side to see everything in your favorite area.³

Williamsburg librarian Jessica Zellers wrote a case study of the blog implementation for the July/August/September issue of Virginia Libraries. She shared the process of creating the blog—hosted free at Wordpress.com—and described the benefits:⁴

So the blog makes our job as readers' advisors easier; for example, with just one click, we can pull up a list of books that are strong in character that are owned by the library. The blog also develops us as practitioners. Writing a book review need not be time consuming, but it does require discipline. Even though our reviews are casual and usually pretty short, we have to use our professional skills to articulate the appeal of a book. It is marvelously good practice, for the seasoned veteran and the new practitioner alike.

Zellers also noted the importance of the blog for outreach:

Our reviews are reaching people who would not normally benefit from the RA services offered in our physical library. This is not just speculation; we have received comments on the blog from people throughout the country who have reached BFGB, either through a deliberate invitation or through a fortuitous search engine result. Locals are visiting the blog, too; they have told us so in person and through comments on the blog. At the time of this writing, BFGB is receiving approximately 80 hits per day, not counting hits that originated within the library.

Better service, improved outreach, professional development, and the job made easier: that's a lot of value added through the creative use of relatively simple Web 2.0 technology.

It is nice to see more library administrators take to blogging. At ALA Midwinter, I participated in a lunch conversation with various bibliobloggers hosted by the folks from the Darien Library in Darien, Connecticut. The conversation turned to blogging: blogging libraries, blogging librarians, and blogging directors. I hung on Darien Library director Louise Berry's every word about how she views her organization, what it means to be a blogging director, and how she empowers the staff to contribute. As we discussed what it means to be a blogging director in a culture of trust and participation, I realized that eventually boards and other governing bodies are going to be looking for directors, administrators, and deans with experience blogging and using other technologies as well.

Library director 2.0 will hopefully guide open, decentralized, flatter libraries with a human voice using whatever appropriate social tools are at his or her disposal. But participation can seem a little scary. At a state library association meeting last fall, one librarian said to our group: “My director won't blog. She writes four or five drafts of press releases and has our admin team proof it over and over again. I want us to be a human library.”

I do too.

How cool would it be if the local newspapers syndicated their headlines with an RSS feed so that you could subscribe to them? And blogged “live” from government meetings? And posted dozens of photos (all the ones that didn't make it in this week's paper) on a Flickr account, especially if there was breaking news? OK, we're biased because we want them to do it so that we can feed the headlines, blog posts and photos onto our own Darien Community Matters blog, providing the most balanced, accurate and up-to-date information possible. And I guess that you could say that we're becoming Web 2.0 missionaries…. Because we (that's me and Assistant Director Melissa Yurechko) invited Josh Fisher, editor of the Darien Times over to discuss it, as the first of a series of meetings with the local news media.

Louise Berry, “Web 2.0,” Darien Library Directors Blog, Aug. 10, 2006, http://www.darienlibrary.org/directorsblog/archives/2006/08/web_20_1.html

Why might library directors blog? What might the benefits be?

• Improved communication—Wouldn't it be useful to be able to communicate library news and important details about library business to the most people with an easy-to-use mechanism? It would also set an example, and top-down buy-in is so important for technology projects and organizational shifts.
• Human interaction—Some human discourse from the top might be very welcome in many libraries, internally and externally. Open comments would allow discussion.
• You have cool things to say!—Tell your story, your day-to-day adventures, your thoughts on the library and its collection. Blog your plans and strategies. This isn't top-secret work, but blogging creates a level of transparency that could benefit many libraries.
• Your voice is important.—The voice of library administration carries a lot of weight. Here's what The Cluetrain Manifesto says about voice: “But learning to speak in a human voice is not some trick, nor will corporations convince us they are human with lip service about ‘listening to customers.’ They will only sound human when they empower real human beings to speak on their behalf.”⁵

I spend an awful lot of time soliciting and then responding to feedback and suggestions from our users. Lately, the written suggestions in the box asking for “newer” and “better” DVDs have outnumbered the requests for specific books or authors by nearly 12 to 1. My response to the requests for newer, better DVDs has always been that we buy what Blockbuster doesn't—the hard-to-find TV shows—the series, the old shows & films, the BBCAmerica & PBS films—and not the drivel (Oops. I'm showing my bias. Sorry) that appears in the theaters. However, when people request a specific title, whether book, music, movie, or magazine, we'll usually buy it.

I've just finished a lengthy analysis of our collection, including what we buy, how much it's used, and what our users ask for. The not-surprising conclusion I've come to is that DVD and Books on CD are used far more than our print collection. For example, one copy of a bestselling book by John Grisham got 59 circs during the period I was reviewing, while The Sopranos DVD recorded 354 circs. A Book on CD version of the same Grisham novel logged in 153 circs. Clearly, the format of choice is not print. In examining our reference questions logged in that period of time, requests for specific movies or Books on CD outnumbered specific requests for print materials by 5 to 1.

Patricia Uttaro, From the Director …: News and Views from the Director of the Ogden Farmers' Library, Sept. 14, 2006, http://ofldirector.blogspot.com/2006/09/i-spend-awful-lot-of-time-soliciting.html

And what other, personal benefits might there be? I asked Jeff Trzeciak, University Librarian at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, his thoughts on blogging for the university library. He replied, “It helps me organize my thoughts.—I think carefully about what I want to say before saying it on my blog. That helps me to craft the message.”⁶

I would urge administrators, deans, and directors to dive in and try blogging.

A blog is a great way to build an interesting, interactive community Web site. You don't even have to call it a blog—blog software is flexible, easy to use, and multi-purpose. Take a look at Western Springs History for an example of a community Web site, created with blog software, that encourages conversation and participation. (see figure 3). Created by Aaron Schmidt and Jessamyn West, the site uses a Wordpress installation to build a local history archive. Blog categories become street names, and blog entries become address numbers. Many entries include a photograph of the Western Springs residence at that address.

Comments are enabled, allowing Western Springs residents to fill in details on the historic homes they occupy. Talking about this site in the Social Tools and Libraries Roadshow, Jenny Levine points out that who better should fill in a town's local history but the citizens of the town itself!

Blogging Resources

Blogging for a Good Book http://bfgb.wordpress.com

Darien Library www.darienlibrary.org

McMaster University Library Blog http://ulatmac.wordpress.com

Technorati www.technorati.com

Western Springs History Web Site www.westernspringshistory.org

WordPress.com http://wordpress.com

LIS Student Blogging

One of my favorite things to introduce LIS students to is blogging. All of my Internet Fundamentals class students get a Wordpress blog for the semester to chronicle their discoveries and opinions. Other LIS professors are doing the same. Steven L. MacCall, associate professor, School of Library and Information Studies at the University of Alabama uses blogs as well. He reports:

We introduced the practice in the context of a weekly writing assignment for the required introductory “Organization of Information” course. In this course, students use the blog platform in a very specific and functional way related to the transferring of regularly occurring course assignments to me. This technique has been very successful because it quickly demystifies the blogging process so that students are not intimidated, but rather turn out to be relieved once they understand that blogging facilitates a very natural and normal writing process: that of journaling weekly writing assignments. In fact, some brag to their husbands/wives/children that they are now bloggers! The downside of this technique is that they are really not *true* bloggers in the sense of a blogging community in which RSS feed aggregators are used to subscribe to community members' tagged posts and comments feeds for more real time blog interaction. This level of understanding of the blogging process comes later in more advanced courses. I've found that many students easily transition to a “blogging culture” during advanced courses; however, some students continue to think that blogging is linear, one-way communication, so I find myself having to break these students of the “bad” habits that they acquired in my introductory “Organization of Information” course! (Steven L. McCall, e-mail interview by the author, May 23, 2007)

In the department Tech Tips for Every Librarian in Computers in Libraries magazine, I detailed the steps for creating a librarian's info-portal with NetVibes and various RSS feeds from social sites.⁹

The example I created for the article was born out of one of the group projects I assign in my Internet Fundamentals class. I used NetVibes to build a resource that your librarians and staff may come to use a lot. See the sidebar on page 20 for a step-by-step breakdown of how to create your own RSS portal.

You could also build more than just an internal portal for staff. Aggregator/do-it-yourself sites such as NetVibes offer a chance to create a dynamically updating library user's portal as well. In the Roadshow, Jenny Levine demonstrates this point by using SuprGlu to build an automatically updating site for a local library by harnessing various feeds. What does this approach do for the social library? It uses the power of Web 2.0 to create sites that require little upkeep once the feeds are in place.

Rss Resources

Alerts and RSS Feeds Page of the University of Wisconsin–Madison Libraries www.library.wisc.edu/alerts/rss-alert-guides.html

NetVibes www.netvibes.com

SuprGlu www.suprglu.com

Kathleen Kern, assistant reference librarian, assistant professor of library administration, and virtual reference coordinator, Central Reference Services at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign library, spoke with me about their IM reference service.¹¹ The university library uses both vendor-supplied virtual reference software and IM to answer questions. The service is staffed with librarians and with GSLIS graduate students, who are also paid for their work.

“Our stats for IM vary greatly by time of the year,” she reported. “In 2006, we had 5270 IMs. IM + chat (Docutek) was 7059. IM was 75% of the total questions asked through VR.” She also noted that the librarians do not count e-mail as virtual reference, but there were 3,667 e-mails answered by central reference. The VR statistics are for the undergraduate library and the central reference desk. Kern described the library's busiest month: “In October of 2006 we had 935 IM and 1157 IM + chat. April 2007 was a not-too-distant second with 773 IMs and 1042 IM + chat. October and April are always the peak months for VR, as they are for in-person reference.”

The lowest statistics came in June 2005 with IM = 65 and IM + chat = 57. The lowest numbers for 2006 were in July with IM = 111 and IM + chat = 225. “During the peak months IM = 75–80% of our total VR and during the slower months IM can be as low as 50% of our VR,” Kern noted. “This fluctuate seems to reasonably correlate with what we know about the faculty/grad and undergraduate user groups in terms of when they do their work.”

Chat ranges from 100 to 300 interactions a month, whereas IM ranges from 65 to over 950 a month. Kern and librarian David Ward discussed reasons for this in their article “Combining IM and Vendor-Based Chat: A Report from the Frontlines of an Integrated Service Portal” in Libraries and the Academy.¹²

What about buy-in from students and faculty? “I'd say that the buy-in is tremendous,” Kern noted. “IM is certainly much more heavily used by undergraduates than by graduate students or faculty. We think that this is shifting a little, but have not collected the data.” Because IM has a much higher percentage of undergrad users, the librarians have retained the Docutek software. “This summer, we are piloting Meebo and I expect that this will replace Docutek by the fall,” Kern reported. “The response to the widget has been good, from both patrons and librarians. I have not looked at the data yet, but I am anticipating a shift from IM to the Meebo widget since it is so visible and easy.”¹³

I've been asked a lot about our success, especially relative to other stand-alone services. I am still a little stumped, but I think that our user base (36K+ students, and several thousand faculty and staff) plays a role. Our campus is the size of a small city. Alums also use our service

We've had few restrictions on use of the service. We cannot provide non-affiliates with access to our databases and we limit how much time we spend with them (so that we can focus on our students, faculty, etc.) but we try to point them in the right direction. We have never limited the service to “ready reference” so from the start our patrons have known that they can ask us anything.

We have long hours of service which closely mirror our open hours for the library building and the hours of our Central Reference and Information Desk—less 1/2 hour for opening and closing.

We've recently expanded the service hours and our Undergraduate Library staffs until midnight during the school year, adding 1.5 hours a day of service Sunday–Thursday.

M. Kathleen Kern, e-mail interview by the author, July 6, 2007

“Marketing has been light, but the service is mentioned in workshops and I think that there is a lot of word-of-mouth,” Kern told me. “Since we staff the service from the reference desks in the Undergrad and Central Reference InfoDesk, we are able to raise in-person patron awareness of the service. Some of the graduate assistants have also been great about talking up the service to patrons. The librarians also use promotional Post-it Note pads, business cards and Flickr cards to raise awareness.

“Most important to our volume has been the product placement aspect. The library has either Ask A Librarian or Library Help as a link from all of the library's Web pages and within the online catalog,” stated Kern.

Kern has no fear of success: “We are planning to market in the fall and one of my colleagues asked if that was ok with me since it may bump up our volume. I said that we should be so lucky and no one would ever say ‘we can't circulate so many books; let's buy less.’ It will likely create a workflow problem for us and I will need to figure out some staffing scenarios, but it is a happy problem to have.”¹⁴

There have been some interesting new twists on IM on the Web of late. As Kern mentioned, instant messaging is now being embedded in Web pages and blogs via the use of Meebo and the Meebo Me widget.

The most serious security concern comes from file transfers. At our library, staff members are using either Trillian, which we set to not accept file transfers, or Meebo, which doesn't yet support file transfers. The second security concern involves clicking on links. We have asked people to be as careful about doing that as they are about clicking on attachments to email—or more careful since some viruses can apparently mask themselves as a person on your IM buddy list.

Joy Weese Moll, “IM a Librarian,” Wanderings of an Online Librarian, Sept. 6, 2006, http://joy.mollprojects.com/myblogs/wanderings/2006/09/im-librarian.html

Meebo is an IM aggregator that can access all of your IM accounts, like Trillian or Gaim. BUT it's Web-based. You can access your accounts without installing any desktop IM client (see figure 5). The IM windows and buddy lists open inside the Web window. Meebo Me creates the HTML code to embed an IM window in any Web page: your library blog or wiki, or your library's classic Contact Us page—anywhere you'd like the library to be present.

Meebo.com is a website for instant messaging from absolutely anywhere. Whether you're at home, on campus, at work, or traveling foreign lands, hop over to meebo.com on any computer to access all of your buddies and chat with them, no downloads or installs required, for free!

About page, Meebo.com, http://blog.meebo.com/?page_id=205

Benefits of using Meebo include

• Viruses cannot get through the Web interface.
• You have easy access to all of your IM accounts in one place.
• Anyone can IM you even when you are not online.

Meebo will also create a Web-based chat room to use with colleagues or library users. You can configure the room, invite buddies, and display video inside the space. Librarians might use the rooms for planning with colleagues or for chatting online with groups of library users.

Meebo's help page describes Meebo Me as “a small chat window that you can put on your webpage for visitors to talk with you…. Your buddy list at meebo.com will light up when someone visits your page and then you can double click on their name to strike up a conversation. In one click, no registration or download required, visitors can start typing in the chat window on your page to talk with you.”¹⁵ See the Darien Library Contact Us page for a great example of a Meebo Me widget embedded in a library Web site.

What's the next step? I'd like to see this type of IM functionality taken even further—with the help of our vendors. Just imagine! We could embed an IM librarian on every results page of a catalog or database search. This would definitely place the librarian at the point of need with our users.

Inserting a Meebo Me widget is easy. The simple process includes configuring the name of your widget, choosing the dimensions and colors of your widget, and entering your Meebo account information. The code you need to embed your widget is generated and can be pasted wherever you'd like a presence for your IM librarian.

Take a look at what some libraries are doing with Meebo and Meebo Me at the LibSuccess Wiki. Putting the library at the point of need of your users via a simple, seamless interface is easy and within reach of any size library!

Above we noted the increasing numbers of directors and library administrators sharing their voice via blogs. Check out the Meebo Me–crafted IM box for Todd Stephens, County Librarian for South Carolina's Spartanburg County (see figure 6). He is in the forefront—one of the first library administrators to be available to patrons via IM.

IM Resources

Darien Library Contact Page www.darienlibrary.org/contact.php

LibSuccess Wiki www.libsuccess.org

Meebo www.meebo.com

Meebo Me www.meebome.com

Todd Stephens IM Box www.infodepot.org/zUsing/AskLibIM.asp

UIUC Ask Us Page www.library.uiuc.edu/askus

Wikis, however, require a bit more know-how than blogs or IM—and feature a slightly steeper learning curve. In our Social Tools and Libraries Roadshow, Jenny Levine tells the crowd that she can't wait to see the next incarnation of wiki software: easy, intuitive, and fluid, like an ultra-deluxe WYSIWYG interface. That certainly will make our group work even easier.

Current wiki tools, however, can be very useful for library-related projects. And they can be presented in a way that will not intimidate. Take, for example, the “New Phone Training” on a wiki at the Allen County Public Library in Fort Wayne, Indiana. It is a well-designed instructional tool, featuring a FAQ, a useful guide to setting up and retrieving voice mail, and pages devoted to every aspect of the new phone system. It is clean, easy to navigate and use, and on the front page, there is a note from the creators: “Don't be scared of the word ‘wiki’—this is just a Web page …:)”¹⁶

The ACPL also uses a wiki for the group work of its “Digital Collective.” Check out the ACPL Digital Collective for a perfect example of using a wiki to organize, annotate, and share technology planning and more (see figure 7).

At the June 2007 American Library Association conference, Matthew Bejune, assistant professor of library science at Purdue University Libraries, spoke about his research on wiki use in libraries.¹⁷ His findings will appear in a future issue of Information Technology and Libraries. According to Bejune, library wikis can be classified in one of four groups:

1. collaboration between libraries
2. collaboration between library staff (internal)
3. collaboration between staff and patrons
4. collaboration between patrons

Bejune noted that groups 1 and 2 combined make up about 76 percent of all library wiki use. He suggested some questions to keep in mind as we move forward with wikis:

• Why aren't we more in category 3 or 4?
• How might we enable patrons to build or modify a library's information?
• How will libraries next use wikis?¹⁸

“Experimentation seems to be one of the best methods for furthering the use of wikis in libraries,” Bejune said in an e-mail interview. “Consider LibraryWikis as an example. When I set out to do my research I did not intend to create a wiki as a companion to my research article. However, as my research progressed it became clear that a wiki would be an ideal way to experiment with the technology, for myself and for the broader library community.”¹⁹

The LibraryWikis site goes beyond being merely a playground, however. It is also a repository of examples of wikis used in libraries. Wikis are being used in a number of ways. Bejune focused on how they are used to support collaboration documented in his four main types: “Anyone who is looking to create a library wiki should start with the list of examples found on LibraryWikis. And after a new library wiki is created, share the wiki with the library community by adding it to LibraryWikis.”²⁰

Bejune also noted that wikis are becoming easier to use: “Easier than creating a web site,” he said. “Because of this, the library community should take advantage of this technology experimenting with wikis for a great number of purposes. What is most important at this time is to feel free with experimenting with wikis to help get us to the next level. Who knows you may have the next best idea for a library wiki.”²¹

Library wikis can be used for more than group work by librarians and other library staff. Some libraries are also creating wiki spaces for patrons. One example is the Stevens County Rural Library District in Washington State. From the site:

What is the Stevens County Wiki Project? I'm glad you asked! The wiki project is dedicated to creating an online wiki guide to Stevens County, Washington, USA. We hope that all of you who know and love the area will contribute your knowledge to the wiki and all our visitors may learn more about Stevens County. If you like this site, please tell your friends! The more people who get involved, the better this guide will be.²²

The guidelines for this wiki provide an overview of how to use and contribute to the resources, tell users what not to do, and urge contributors to have FUN. Business guidelines give details on how local businesses can contribute, including: “In a wiki, all users decide what is relevant and appropriate. In the case of disputes, however, this judgement is deferred to the wiki administrators.”²³ For more information, visit the Guidelines page (listed in the Wiki Resources box below).

Wiki Resources

Allen County Public Library Digital Collective Blogs List http://acpldc.pbwiki.com/ACPL_blogs

Chad Haefele's Coverage of the Wiki Session at ALA www.hiddenpeanuts.com/archives/2007/06/24/ala-2007-harnessing-the-hive-social-networks-libraries

LibraryWikis http://librarywikis.pbwiki.com

PBwiki http://pbwiki.com

SCRLD Wiki Project: Main Page www.scrldwiki.org/index.php/Main_Page

SCRLD Wiki Project: Guidelines Page www.scrldwiki.org/index.php/Main_Page, under

“Contacts and Contributions, Guidelines for Contributing to the Wiki”

The teen Web site at Nashville Public Library also displays a Flickr badge via easily inserted code provided by the site. Kyle Cook, reference librarian at NPL, detailed the process for getting images of teen programs to the Web via Flickr in an e-mail interview that included his NPL colleague Jenny Ellis:

Instead of having all the librarians share one account, we used the networking features in Flickr. Each YA librarian created an account for their branch's teen area. Then, each staff person joined the NPL's Teen Flickr group. The bulk of the work is in setting up the accounts and adding photos.²⁶

To see this in action visit the NPL Main Teens' Photos on Flikr.

Flickr Resources

A Day in Allen County Indiana 2007 http://flickr.com/photos/acplinfo/sets/72157600028476205

Day in the Life of SC Libraries www.flickr.com/groups/nlwdayinsc

Lackman Branch Virtual Tour www.flickr.com/photos/11329886@N00/sets/72157594291410121

NPL Main Teens' Photos www.flickr.com/photos/nplmainteens