A blog for every project
I was as excited as anyone when I saw that librariesinteract had launched, plugging the yawning gap that had appeared in the world of Australian library blogs (the Australiobiblioblogosphere? The biblioblogosouthernhemisphere?). The need for ambitious, inclusive, widely read projects is obvious.
What I have been thinking about, though, is the application of blogs for smaller projects and addressed to more specific readerships.
MPOW is sending me and my colleague Sarah to ALIA 06, and we figured that a blog might be a good way to provide instant interaction with workmates in faraway Sydney. After all, the traditional method of reporting back after the event is pretty unhelpful – a monologue delivered after the event as item 3.2 on the agenda, with the write-up bunged on the intranet and never looked at again. Any idea what your colleagues got up to at ALIA 04? Me neither.
The way we see it, our conference blog has the following characteristics that are different to most blogs:
1) Focussed readership – our target market is specifically library staff at MPOW. It’s a way of breaking down the barrier of time and distance in order to make ALIA 06 meaningful to the library as a whole. (Anybody is welcome to join in the conversation, though!)
2) Short term – we expect the blog to be wound up shortly after the conference
3) Gradual build-up with a burst of intense activity during the conference itself
4) Archived in a meaningful way*
Has anybody else looked at using blogs in this short-term focussed way at their library? What kind of projects have they been used for? Has it been useful? Are there any pitfalls we should look out for?
We’re looking forward to seeing how the blog works out. You can keep up with it at http://blogs.usyd.edu.au/aliaconference/ Maybe we’ll be presenting about it at the next library conference we get to?
*Probably the Sydney eScholarship Repository, which is an interesting project itself. Come and hear about it if you are coming to ALIA 06.
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