The nuts and bolts behind the National Library blogs

At the LIANZA conference I went to a number of sessions that touched on blogging. Although some declared that blogging is, like, so last year, many of us - including, obviously, the National Library - are still working out what we could or should use this medium for.

On Tuesday I had a rushed but interesting talk with a small group of people who are either blogging for their library, or interested in blogging for their library. A lot of topics were sparked off, but there wasn't time to compare notes. So here's a few points on the nuts and bolts behind one of the Library's two blogs, which is part of our efforts to figure out what blogging at the Library might mean.

Create Readers is written by our School Services staff. It's designed to take the kind of advice and information that these staff give out face-to-face (book reviews, reading tips, literacy info, interesting events) and put it online - and turn it into, hopefully, a resource for more people and a bigger conversation.

Starter kit

There were two kinds of preparation for the blogs. First, there was writing the proposal and documentation for our Senior Leadership Group. Then there was preparing the guidelines for staff.

I prepared some short documents for staff, outlining comment moderation and the evaluation we'd be conducting of the blog (see below). I also prepared a short guide to writing for the web, with the standard advice: short words, short sentences, short paragraphs; descriptive link text; stack your title with key words; use tags consistently to help readers find related posts.

I also drew up a "7 ideas of what to blog if you're stuck for ideas" (introduce and link to a piece of research, a blog or a website; provide an interesting set of links on a certain topic; write a sneeze page).

And I gave everyone the link to my bookmarks on Ma.gnolia.com, where I've been collecting articles and blog posts on web writing and effective blogging for about a year now.

Building the blog

We decided to use Blogger - a blogging platform owned by Google - rather than build this functionality into our main website, www.natlib.govt.nz. There were four advantages to this:

1. Blogger is a free, popular and easy to use blogging platform, which a number of our staff are already familiar with.

2. We saved time and money by making use of a third-party product, rather than building, testing, and hosting our own.

3. Even though we didn't host the blogs on our servers, we could customise the URLs to fit with other National Library subsite addresses, meaning we have the option of changing the blogging technology later if we wish because we control the blog addresses.

4. We could establish and administer the blogs ourselves, without having to bring our tech staff into the project set-up.

This made setting up the blogs a matter of hours. Three of us sat down and selected and tweaked the template; invitations were sent out to the editorial circle (see below); staff sent through suggestions for a list of related blogs and websites; a Feedburner RSS account was set up and the Google Analytics code dropped in.

Editorial circle

While the contributors to LibraryTechNZ mostly sit within a few metres of each other, the writers for Create Readers are spread around New Zealand. To kick off, we've nominated an 'editor' in each of the regional centres. Staff are being given a target number of posts per month (say 2 reviews) and it's the editors' role to encourage and help staff, and to publish the posts.

The editors are having regular teleconferences to compare notes and discuss ideas. They email or phone or IM when they need a bit of a hand with something. The biggest learning curve has been transferring draft posts from Word onto the blog via Notepad to strip out the formatting, and editing in the HTML view if there's any mucky code left.

It's likely that the editorial roles will be shifted around every few months, and also likely that once staff are all used to blogging, editors won't be required. However, I think it will remain useful on a group blog to have someone ensuring that there's a steady flow of new posts, rather than peaks and ebbs.

Comment moderation

We're running two kinds of moderation on the blogs. LibraryTechNZ is post-moderated: comments are published upon submission, and will only be edited or removed if they are spam, completely off-topic, or abusive/offensive (and no, that doesn't mean critical of National Library activities).

Create Readers is being pre-moderated: staff are reviewing the posts before they are published. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, pre-moderation is usually recommended for blogs that might be read by children (we've recently had our first comment from a kid - 'greymouth library kid' commenting on what book first got him/her reading). Secondly, we're interested in seeing whether the different forms of moderation require more or less time, and we're building this into the evaluation of the blogs.

Evaluation

In December, we'll do the first review of the blogs. We're using Google Analytics to collect information about site visitation and visitors. We'll look at the number of posts and the number of comments, and try to get an idea of whether we're reaching our target audience, and engaging them.

I'm also really interested in how staff find blogging. All the writers are keeping a simple time log. We'll run a face-to-face session (and an email survey for non-Wellington staff) to talk about what we've learnt from blogging, and what we've thought about the process, and how we think it fits in with the other things we do.

There's a lot to think about, and a lot we can learn. Currently, Create Readers is running really well, with 20+ posts since August 22, and just as many comments (some not even from other staff members!).

My own prediction is that this blog may only be a first step into a new way of approaching the online delivery of information and services. The brilliant thing, from my point of view, is that blogging provides a very low barrier of entry to get a group of people actively exploring what we could be doing in the online environment.