Over the summer we have been debating the issues around Academic Library Blogging which I thought I would share. I’m also hoping the post and any comments may help consolidate my ideas also as I keep changing my mind about what should be the purpose and content of our blogs!

Currently we have an Electronic Resources blog (which is linked from our website but I think is primarily aimed at library staff), other specific project blogs (mainly hosted on internal software and password protected), communication blogs (again, password protected) and 5 subject blogs. The subject blogs have been set up by their corresponding subject librarians and contain a variety of content from Learning Centre updates (such as changes to opening hours etc.) to useful subject resources the subject librarian has come across online. The frequency of posts varies; some average around one post a week, others one post a month or less.

At the beginning of the summer break (seems like yesterday but was actually almost 4 months ago!), we decided it might be a nice idea to combine some of the subject blogs which cover similar subject areas (e.g. the Science areas and the Engineering areas). This would mean less duplication of posts and the ability to share resources which may be useful across different subject areas. So I found out about how we could use categories within WordPress to create different RSS feeds for the different subjects within one blog, set up a rough blog, and imported the content of each of the blogs.

I then started thinking about how the majority of people are likely to use our blogs. From looking at the stats on Feedburner (we use this to allow users to subscribe by e-mail), it seems that more people use the e-mail subscription than the RSS subscription. Unfortunately, I couldn’t figure out how to set up e-mail subscriptions for each category feed, and I was also concerned about how confusing it would make it for the user if they had to work out which subject to subscribe to and whether they wanted RSS feed or e-mail. We would end up with about 10 different subscription options which really isn’t ideal. Although it would be great to get people using RSS feeds (this is something I would really like to encourage, particularly with our staff and researchers to help them keep up-to-date in their area of interest), in reality this is not going to happen in the short-term.

As well as the practical issues, we were a little concerned about how the blog would be managed with so many administrators and whether we would need to agree to a style of writing and a recommended post frequency (we didn’t want to see hundreds of posts on one subject and only one or two for another). There were also concerns that those physically visiting the blog may find it very confusing. My main concern when considering things like this is always that it makes sense from a user point of view and I just wasn’t convinced that this would. If we had all subjects on board and everyone was familiar with RSS feeds and using categories to filter posts on the blog, it may work, but for now I’m not convinced.

Despite us deciding against the joint blog for now, it was a very useful exercise as it really made me think about the purpose of our blogs. In my mind there are two primary reasons for the blogs as they stand at the moment:

1. To disseminate information about Learning Centres - events, new services, opening hours, news etc.
2. To share information and recommended resources relating to subjects

I would also like to encourage discussion on the blogs but this is something we haven’t managed to achieve yet so they are primarily one-way communication channels (commenting is available but not widely used).

In my mind, I think there is definitely a need for both these applications, but I’m not sure they should necessarily be combined. I think in the future I’d like to see a departmental blog to keep all users notified about Learning Centres (a sort of “newsy” type blog), with additional subject blogs as necessary. This would eradicate most of the duplicate posting as the subject blogs could stay focused purely on the subject material and not the general information. It would also mean that students (and staff) across all schools would be able to subscribe to the Learning Centre blog whereas currently we only offer it to certain schools depending on the librarians, their familiarity with the technology and their willingness to blog.

How has anyone else decided to approach blogging in academic libraries? Do you have an ingenious solution which I haven’t thought about? Please let me know in the comments if so.

Whilst we’re on the topic of library blogging, I wanted to share a brilliant quote from Phil Bradley recently on the LIS-Bloggers mailing list:

If you can’t think of what to write, then not only should you not have a weblog, you shouldn’t have a library or a job. Your library or information centre should be fascinating – what new resources do you have? What are members of staff doing? What plans have you for the future? What about administrative details, like changing opening hours? Any interesting queries that you’ve had? What about the resources that you find on the net that would be helpful for your users? What about a site of the week, resource of the month, client of the year? What about photographs of interesting collections, or covers of new books? Surely it’s not a question of what to write about, but more a problem of what NOT to write about?

This certainly gave me food for thought, as I’ve often heard staff wonder what they can blog about and worrying that they might set up a blog and then not know what to post about. I’ll be remembering to bear all these uses in mind next time someone says they don’t know what they can blog about, thanks Phil!

Thanks to a post by Nicole Engard, I have added the Facebook Blog Networks application to my Facebook page and registered ownership of Joeyanne Libraryanne.

Facebook Blog Networks is a way to display on your Facebook profile which blogs you own, author and read so that others can find interesting blogs. It also means that each blog registered on there has it’s own page where the feed is displayed (once you have enough fans!), and where readers have the opportunity to review and leave comments about the blog as you can see in the screenshot below (click for larger image, select All Sizes and then Original)

If you do add the application on Facebook (or already have it) please add my blog to the list of those you read. It would be nice to see if any Joeyanne Libraryanne readers are on Facebook.

One of my interests in Web 2.0 technology is using tools to improve productivity. It’s the reason I love RSS feeds so much, I’m a fan of anything that can help save time or improve productivity in both my working life and life on general. When I bought my iPod Touch in December I was keen to integrate that to help increase my productivity which it did to an extent but it had the distinct disadvantage of requiring wifi to do most things. The release of the iPod Touch software 2.0 and the App Store has changed all that though…

To-do lists using ToodleDo and Todo

I’ve always been a fan of the good old to-do list and although I’m not a GTD advocate (mainly as I don’t know too much about it!) I do enjoy finding out about new GTD tools. ToodleDo has been a firm favourite of mine for a while now, I’ve tried the popular Remember the Milk but I personally prefer the simplicity of ToodleDo. I have it embedded in my Pageflakes homepage so as soon as I load my browser at either work or home I see my to-do list. It’s particularly useful at work but I do also use it to help me organise my home life and studying too. I was also using the slim version of ToodleDo on my iPod (see screenshot) which was great when I was at home or work and therefore had wifi access, but I was unable to use it when out and about as it was all online.

ToodleDo Slim

Luckily, that has now changed thanks to Appigo’s Todo application (NB: site seems to be down at the moment but it has worked for me in the past). The main page of my Todo app currently looks like the image below with details of my lists and the number of tasks in each (as an aside, you may have noticed I am loving the ability to take screenshots from my iPod!).

Screenshot of the main page of my Todo app

When you go view the All list it lists all of your tasks in order of due date. I’d like to see different ordering of tasks (e.g. priority as it also uses priorities when you set the task), and Appigo are hoping to add this in a future release.

It synchronises with my ToodleDo account which means I can now update the list on my iPod whilst I’m away from the Internet, and then sync when I get back. I can also use the web version still and then update my iPod at the end of the working day. It might sound like such a simple thing but this really has helped me in the way I work, particularly as I often spend my time on the bus in the morning planning my day. Another neat feature (purely aesthetic but it makes it look nicer!) is that you can choose a different way of marking tasks complete. In the screenshot below you can see I’ve opted for a pretty boring blue tick with faded task at the moment but there are lots of different options available (including a DONE stamp across the task which is quite satisfying to look at!).

Screenshot of my current list of tasks for Study

The ToodleDo team and the Appigo team are both great at listening to user feedback and acting on it too, so I really do recommend them both if you work using to-do lists and want to access it on the web or on an iPhone/iPod Touch.

Blogging using the WordPress iPhone app

The other thing I tend to do on the bus is jot down ideas for blog posts or even write whole posts. As a get around for no Internet I had been writing them as e-mails (you can write without Internet access), saving them as drafts, and then sending them when I got home. Then I’d have to jump on the PC, copy the text, paste it into WordPress, and add any links and images I needed. So I was delighted to hear that WordPress were releasing an iPhone app and I have been eagerly awaiting it’s release. It’s finally here, and it’s great (I wrote most of this blog post on it). At the moment it’s tricky to add in links or formatting as the HTML tags are on the third keyboard on the iPhone, but for just getting the text down and working offline it’s great. You can then add it to the drafts folder and edit it on the PC. It could do with more functionality (e.g. links, ability to adminstrate comments etc.) but I’m sure that will come in the future.

Other productivity tools

Those are the main things I use with my iPod (in addition to Microsoft Exchange which I use for email and calendar) but on the web I also use:

• PageFlakes homepage as mentioned earlier
• Google Calendar (I use this at work to promote sessions as mentioned in an earlier blog post)
• del.icio.us to store useful bookmarks
• Bloglines (I currently use the Beta version) as my RSS feed reader, which also has an iPhone optimised version but although it looks pretty is very basic so I don’t tend to use it often

I’ve also dabbled with online document creators such as Google Docs, Zoho, Buzzword and Blist (there are probably more of these I have forgotten!).

I’m always keen to try new tools, are there any other useful productivity tools you love which I haven’t mentioned? How do you manage your time and organise your work?

I upgraded the blog to WordPress 2.6 last night - extra features in the latest WordPress include version history (could be useful for me as I tend to write a few drafts before publishing my longer posts), press this (a bookmarklet you can use to blog about websites etc.), picture captions, theme previews, and Google Gears support.

Upgrading is always a scary experience as I’m terrified I’ll lose my content (I didn’t actually do it myself this time, Chris helped me). Although all seemed fine initially, I soon realised that the front page was working but the individual posts weren’t showing (the message “Sorry, no posts matched your criteria” was displayed).

After a bit of investigating (i.e. Googling!) this morning, we found it is a known bug affecting anyone whose permalink includes index.php. Thankfully, the solution is simple. Details are given on the WordPress website but basically the easiest way to solve it is to add values into the category and tag fields in the permalink options page (the values can simply be the words category and tag). That should hopefully fix it, it did for me.

Apologies to anyone trying to view posts last night, but it should be back to normal now.

I’ve been playing with the new Google Sites offering on and off for a couple of months now. I joined under my work e-mail address and created a sort of mini portal for our team at work which could either be the answer to my prayers or a complete nightmare - I’m still undecided.

It took me a while to sort out a separate Google Apps account under my work e-mail but I got there eventually, although it does tend to get a little confusing having two Google accounts (one personal, one work). Once I’d registered it took me to our organisation’s section in Google, where I found around 30 other people who had registered (only one other from my department). No one else seems to have looked at the Sites element yet, so I thought I’d experiment.

The problem:

The main reason for me doing this was to replace and improve upon our current situation at the Information Helpdesk (enquiry desk). There’s two main elements that are currently in paper format which I feel would benefit from being electronic - a useful information folder and a helpdesk diary.

We currently have a “Useful Information Folder” into which goes, unsurprisingly, any information which may be useful for us when we’re on the helpdesk (e.g. procedural information, phone numbers, maps etc.). This would work OK if we remembered to use it properly. I try to keep it up-to-date, but being in paper format it’s not ideal and I know it’s not easy to find the information you’re after (it has an A-Z index but then there’s all the problems like is it a phone or a telephone?). I have to admit, I’ve never used it to help with an enquiry and I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone else use it either.

We also have an information book, sort of like a diary. Into this goes details to keep us all up-to-date (for example, current assignments and where best to look for information on a certain topic, new projects that have recently been added to stock, etc.). Again, this is fine in principle, but in practice I know we don’t use it as we should and tend to e-mail each other instead.

The solution?

I’ve been thinking about how we can improve things and I knew I wouldn’t be able to rest until I’d given it a go. The voices in my head just weren’t going away, they were screaming at me and tormenting me:

• Useful Information Folder = WIKI
• Diary = BLOG

I’ve been wanting to get a procedural wiki sorted for a while now, but it’s such a mammoth task that I haven’t been able to give it a go (I think it’s something that will one day have to go through the project route and get everyone in the department on board).

As for a blog, other teams in our department are using them with great success, and as long as everyone gets on board and are comfortable reading and contributing to the blog then I think it makes a lot more sense than a paper diary.

I didn’t want to have two totally different products and needed something that is easy to use for a total novice, so when I heard about Google Sites which combines the two products (and more!) and is supposedly very easy to use, I thought it was worth a go. One of the big advantages to putting it all electronic means you can now search the whole site to very easily find what you’re looking for (no more searching through indexes!). Another great feature is the page subscription, you can either subscribe to the whole site (in which case you will receive an e-mail every time something is changed with the altered text in the e-mail), or just certain pages (e.g. staff could subscribe to the announcements page so that they would receive an e-mail whenever a new announcement was added). You can see a screenshot below (click for larger version - it’s nothing special, I’ve only spent a very limited amount of time on it so far!).

I’ve still only really got a basic skeleton of the portal but the main sections include:

• Announcements (to replace the diary)
• Procedures and useful information (to replace the useful information folder)
• Useful documents and forms (so that people can quickly and easily download forms we use regularly like room booking sheets and enquiry tracking sheets)

I’ve also added an enquiry follow up form which is linked to Google Spreadsheets. The idea of this is that if a student wants some subject specific help or needs to book an appointment the librarian on duty can complete the enquiry follow up form which will send the enquiry to the spreadsheet (and an alert to anyone who is subscribed to the spreadsheet). I don’t know whether this will work but it’s something to play with.

I’ve asked a few people from the team to have a look at the site and see how easy it is to use before we can make a decision about whether or not it’s something worth pursuing. I haven’t spent too long on it yet as it might prove to be impractical, but so far I’ve found it relatively straight forward to use.

I can see it could be very useful for collaborative websites, but to be honest I think most organisations already have this sort of thing sorted with intranets or other solutions such as Microsoft SharePoint. Nevertheless, Google’s offering has the huge advantage that it’s free and easily accessed from anywhere.

Has anyone else used Google Sites for anything or do you know of an even better alternative?

If there’s one blogging feature I am absolutely loving at the moment, it’s the ability to schedule posts. There are times when I have loads of ideas for new blog posts but I don’t necessarily want to publish them all at once. With the scheduling feature in Wordpress 2.5, I can write when I feel like it, and choose to publish at a later date.

It’s very useful for posts that you know you want to publish soon but you want to add a couple more links to or a little bit more content before publishing, as well as meaning that you can spread posts out more evenly instead of having a mad frenzy of posts one day and then nothing for the next two weeks (I know I have been guilty of this in the past!).

It’s also a great feature for institutional blogs; sometimes you may want to write a blog post about something but don’t want to release it until a certain date (e.g. following implementation of a new resource or publicising a particular event). In the past I’ve written drafts but often forgot to publish them at the right time, blog scheduling makes it so much easier.

I’m certainly very thankful to WordPress for such a great addition to their blogging software, the only slight confusion was that when I was first playing, I didn’t realise you had to set the status of the post as “Published” even though you don’t want to publish it until a certain date or time. Now that I’ve worked it out though, it really is useful.

Following on from UK law librarian blogger Jennie’s search to find UK librarian blogs, she decided to create a wiki to keep the list up to date and create one place to find UK librarian bloggers.

The wiki has developed into different sections for different types of blog (e.g. individual blogs, institutional blogs) and is growing into a great resource.

I’ve volunteered to help Jennie out in keeping all the information up to date and checking all the blogs to ensure the blurb written about them is accurate, and with the help of others it should continue to grow. If you are a UK library blogger and are not currently listed on the wiki, please e-mail Jennie and she will add you to the wiki (contact details available on the wiki front page).

I guess the title of the post is pretty self-explanatory really; Joeyanne.co.uk has recently had a redesign. A few days before Easter I trawled the web for inspiration and came up with a very random mix of ideas that I wanted to incorporate into my new design and came up with a very rough brief. I wanted round corners, clearer options for subscribing, a cleaner page with less columns and a greater concentration on the main content, lots of icons and a better font, as well as a huge long list of other requests. Working with the designer was very enjoyable although I may be slightly biased as the designer also happens to be my boyfriend, Chris! It was amazing to see my rough list of ideas transformed in a great new blog design. I’m over the moon with the results - it’s everything I was hoping for and more.

Those of you who read the blog via RSS, please take a visit to the new site and let me know what you think. Oh, and in case you’re wondering, the penguin at the header of the page is due to my fascination and slight obsession with all things penguin.

The redesign coincided with the release of WordPress 2.5 so I have also upgraded to that and I have to say I’m so far very impressed. I’m sure it will take a bit of getting used to as the navigation has changed considerably, but it seems to make more logical sense now and I’m noticing more features (I’m not sure if they’re new or I just hadn’t noticed them before but the ability to edit the permalink is a nice little feature as is the ability to set a certain date and time to publish a post, which could be particularly useful at work with certain events to promote).

All in all, it’s great to have a nice new design on the blog and a new admin screen too (I just wish I could find more time to blog about all these “to blog” ideas I have in my head every day!). Thanks ever so much Chris for all your help.

I recently came across a couple of interesting posts about librarian bloggers (or lack of!) in the UK. I also found a similar discussion last year on Brian Kelly’s blog and it doesn’t seem like much has changed since then. At my last study school I was shocked to discover that I was the only one in my cohort of about 40 that kept a blog of any sort, let alone a library blog.

I was very pleased to see my blog mentioned in Jennie’s post, it’s good to know it’s findable at least! Her post is an excellent summary of some of the blogs she found on her search for UK library bloggers, please check it out if you’re interested in what’s going on in the UK library world. There’s also the British Librarian Bloggers group on Google which Phil Bradley set up, but sadly the group isn’t that active.

If you write or know of any other UK library/librarian blogs please feel free to leave a comment here or on Jennie’s post to see if there are others which have been missed.

It got me thinking - just how many other great blogs there are out there that go unnoticed and how do you keep on top of finding blogs which interest you?

I recently got access to my statistics from my hosting and was amazed at how many people view this blog and how many different ways they do so. I found it fascinating to discover what search terms people had searched and found links to my blog, and also wondering whether they’d got what they’d been looking for when they got here (there were quite a few recent searches for Google Calendar synching due to my recent posts on Google Calendar). Then I got thinking about how I found most of the blogs I currently read. I think most of them have spiralled out from my subscribed blogs mentioning a post from their blog or from blog comments.

Anyway, I’m waffling now but I do find this whole thing fascinating - just how findable are our blogs/websites now that there are so many out there and how do people find other useful web resources? Do people generally actively look for them or just happen to stumble upon them?

I’d heard of FriendFeed before today, but a Lifehacker post I read this morning encouraged me to give it a go.

If you haven’t heard of it before, FriendFeed is basically an aggregator of all your online social networks. It pulls together your updates from blogs, video services like YouTube, social bookmarking services like del.icio.us, picture sharing sites like Flickr and Picasa, wishlists like Amazon wishlist, etc etc! You can see in the screenshot the services is currently covers.

It only took a matter of minutes to register and add my feeds so I now have a nice aggregated feed that will give updates on all my different services.

I can imagine this sort of thing could be very useful for keeping up to date with what people are up to via just an RSS feed, although to be honest I don’t see myself using it very much. FriendFeed encourage you to find your friends on their website but to me that sort of defeats the object, I guess you would only have one website to visit then to see what friends are up to but you might as well add the feeds to your RSS reader (presuming you use RSS feeds).

Having said that, I’m having trouble adding my feed to my Bloglines account. It seems to work fine in Google Reader (I use this as a back-up reader), but Bloglines doesn’t recognise the feed.

Anyway, if you are interested in giving it a go please feel free to subscribe to my feed and let me know in the comments if you have a feed to share or any opinions about the service. I imagine more and more of these aggregators will be appearing to help people control their many online accounts so it’s definitely something to keep an eye on.