Forecasting Trends Backwards

“Forecasting for the Future” was the title of an article published in the recent issues of the JANET Newsletter (No. 9, September 2009 – PDF format). It won’t surprise people that the byline for the article was positive about the future:  “Outlook – sunny, with a good chance of videoconferencing“.

To be fair, the byline was a play on words of the topic of the article, which described use of the JANET Video Conference Service (JVCS) at the Met Office. The article concluded with a quotation from Tim Marshall, JANET CEO:

“The Met Office videoconference programmes are an excellent example of how the JANET Videoconference Service makes sense not only in terms of delivering excellent educational content and cost savings, but also through its real contribution in reducing our customers’ carbon footprint“.

Such optimistic views of the benefits which technologies promise to deliver are, however, being criticised. In a post entitled Postdigital: Escaping the Kingdom of the New? Dave White introduced the ‘postdigital’ concept, a topic he revisited after co-facilitating (with Rich Hall) a post-digital F-ALT session on the opening night of this year’s ALT-C conference. As Dave described in that post, in the session (which I attended) the participants were invited to debate a series of statements which were designed to provoke post-digital thoughts, including:

• Learning technologists are obsessed with technology more than learning, which is why elearning will never make the mainstream.
• We are purveyors of the worst kind of spin: ‘This new thing will solve all your problems’.

But how might we go about challenging such ‘technological determinism’ (which, of course, goes beyond the e-learning community)? Inspired by the F-ALT session and further brief discussions with Dave, an approach I took in a panel session on “Top Technology Trends for Libraries and Information Professionals” at the recent ILI 2009 conference was to take as the starting point the optimism felt towards various examples of today’s technologies and to travel backwards in time, and attempt to give plausible reasons why today’s exciting technologies will not be around in the past.

This was an idea I got from a BBC 4 programme back in 2007 which I described in a post on “The History Of The Web Backwards“.  And following the postdigital discussions it occurred to be that the approach might be worth revisiting.

The night prior to the panel session I described the idea to a number of fellow speakers including Tony Hirst and Peter Murray-Rust. Tony was full of enthusiasm for the idea and, as he often does, came up with new ways in which we could use this approach (e.g. looking at a variety of expected future trends and how we got there from the present). And a few days later Tony alerted me of a YouTube video which took a similar approach:

After I had given my brief presentation, which I had published shortly before the conference, Peter Murray-Rust did wonder whether such Radio 4 humour would be understood by an international audience.  And I did notice that some of the tweets about my talk had failed to pick up on the humourous intent of my presentation. To summarise what I said (or meant to say) with respect to the demise of Twitter:

Today many people are exploiting the potential of Twitter to help them find resources they are looking for. Indeed last night I tweeted that I was looking for a good pub to go to and my Twitter community helped me in my information searching task – and because they knew me, they knew to suggest a good real ale pub and not a trendy wine bar. An Ask-A-Librarian service wouldn’t be aware of my personal preferences.

But, as we travel through time backwards, we need to ask “Why did twitter die off in the early part of the century?”

The answer is obvious. Twitter doesn’t scale. As more and more people asked such questions, the Twitterverse became clogged. “It’s similar to email spam” people felt and started to cancel subscriptions to the service.

And of course although I can benefit, as an early adopter, from having large numbers of followers, many people will have only small Twitter communities, and so won’t gain the benefits which I have.  So Twitter is inherently undemocratic and professions such as Librarians, with their commitments to social inclusion, were amongst the first to move away from such undemocratic technologies.

The demise of Twitter was eventually accepted by all.  And in the new environment of the latter part of the twentieth century, people met in pubs with their real friends.  The term ‘virtual friends’ was felt to be on par with ‘imaginary friends’ – something you grow out of. And to mention the ‘followers’ you had would result in strange looks and suggestions that you should seek psychiatric help!

Funnily enough, although I am aware of reasons why people are sceptical about Twitter and why some Twitter fans feel that the service may eventually be replaced by an open source or distributed alternative service,  it wasn’t until I gave the talk that I used the “Twitter is inherently undemocratic” argument.  So using the device of seeking to give persuasive reasons why technologies disappeared as we travel backwards though time did give me some fresh insights.

Why then, did video-conferencing, which had such a bright future in 2009 die out?

Although popular at the high of the environmental concerns in the early years of the twenty-first century subsequent research by sociologists revealed that academic and librarians preferred face-to-face meetings. Further research revealed that most conference participants can’t remember the details of talks given at conferences, which made people question why one should use networked technologies to access talks which are quickly forgotten.  Rather than computer networking, people networking (including plotting, politicking and such skull-duggery – as well as opportunities for sexual relationships) were found to be the real reason why people travel to conferences, although for some strange reasons, such issues were not identified in the user needs gathering exercise.

Might this have an element of truth?

Viewing a WordPress Blog on a Mobile Device

WordPress, in a post somewhat confusing entitled “The Hero Is In Your Pocket“,  have recently announced that they have “launch[ed] a couple of mobile themes that will automatically be displayed when your blog is accessed with a compatible mobile phone“.

The new theme is now enabled by default on blogs, such as this one, which are hosted by WordPress.com. And yes it does make blog posts much easier to read as the mobile interface has a less cluttered interface which, although unlikely to provide significant usability problems on a typical desktop computer, can be irritating on a mobile device, such as a iPhone or iPod Touch (which was used to capture the image of the blog which is illustrated).

Best of all is that this enhanced interface has been provided without the need for me to do anything – no software to be upgraded or new themes to install.

Opening Up Institutional Training Resources

I’m now back from a few day’s at Aberystwyth University, where I had been invited to speak at the launch of the HEFCW-funded Gwella project and to give a seminar on “The ‘Higher Education in a Web 2.0 World’ Report: Implications For IT Service Departments“.

As this involved a long train journey I also sought to maximise my time in Aberystwyth by participating in a regional meeting for Welsh Web managers. During the brief summaries of areas of work which the members of institutional Web management teams had been involved in I noticed that a number of the institutions were involved in the delivery of training in use of Terminal 4′s Content Management System. But why, I wonder, are institutions still developing their own training resources? As the meeting took place at the start of the first international Open Access Week I did wonder whether an institutional move towards (or commitment to) open access for research publications and research data shouldn’t be complemented by an institutional commitment to providing Creative Commons licence for institutional training resources. And shouldn’t Information Services departments and Libraries be taking a leading role in this area? After all it is staff in the IT Services departments who will be well-placed to develop the technical infrastructure to provide access to such resources and Library staff who can advise on access mechanisms, use of metadata, etc.

This suggestion is not new – back in 2005 I presented a paper on “Let’s Free IT Support Materials!“ at the EUNIS 2005 conference. But it is probably timely to revisit this subject, not only due to links with the Open Access Week but also the related interests in open access for learning resources, as described recently in an article entitled “Get it out in the open” published in The Times Higher.

Now I’m not saying that the availability of open training resources, which might include podcasts and screencasts as well as more conventional training resources, will necessarily always be used – perhaps trainers and user support staff will continue to prefer to use resources they have developed themselves. But if that is the case, then what is the point of services such as JORUM and funding initiatives such as JISC’s Open Educational Resources programme? Wouldn’t it be beneficial to the community in general if more people were involved in such debates?

RSS Feeds For Welsh University Web Sites

RSS Usage On Welsh University Home Pages

Last year I published a blog post which provided a summary of usage of RSS feeds on Scottish University home pages. The survey was carried out in July 2008, shortly before the IWMW 2008 event was held in Aberdeen. The aim was to collate evidence on the extent to which best practices in institutional use of RSS were being implemented in Scotland and to facilitate discussions on reasons why best practices may not always be being implemented and ways of addressing such barriers.

As I will be visiting Wales shortly I thought it would be useful to carry out a similar survey of the 12 Welsh Universities.

The Findings

The findings, based on a manual survey carried out on 21 August 2009, are given in the following table.

	Institution	No. of RSS Feeds	Comments
1	Aberystwyth University	0
2	Bangor University	0
3	Cardiff University	0
4	Glamorgan University	0
5	Glyndŵr University	4	RSS feeds for news, sports news, Careers centre news and Student news.
6	Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama	0
7	Swansea University	0
8	Swansea Metropolitan University	1	RSS feed for news.
9	Trinity University College	0
10	University of Wales Institute, Cardiff	0
11	University of Wales, Lampeter	0
12	University of Wales, Newport	0

It appears that only two Welsh institutions are providing RSS feeds which can be found from the home page (16.67%).

Revisiting Community Surveys

Last year’s blog post on RSS usage on Scottish University home pages discussed possible reasons for the low levels of usage, and I don’t intend to revisit that discussion as I suspect the same reasons will be valid for both communities. I should also add that Tony Hirst has developed a tool for dynamic discovery of auto-detectable RSS feeds for all UK University home pages, which currently reports a total of  48 out of 133 institutions (36.1%).

So rather than discussing the specific example of RSS feeds across a sector, I’m more interested in ways in which a sector (or interested and motivated individuals within a sector)  can provide similar (factual) surveys which can help to support discussions and, perhaps, inform policies.

Liz Azyan has compiled lists of UK Universities usage of YouTube, Twitter, Flickr and MySpace. But, as can be seen from the list for MySpace usage, it is not always easy to provide complete coverage and there are likely to be difficulties in ongoing maintenance of such resources. Would it be useful, I wonder, for the Welsh Web management community to set up a wiki to keep a record of trends within their own sector?  This is something I will explore at a meeting of Welsh institutional Web managers at the University of Aberystwyth on Monday.

Top Technology Trends – For The Twentieth Century!

Top Technology Trends for Libraries and Information Professionals

Later this week I’m taking part in the Internet Librarian International (ILI) Conference in London. In addition to running a workshop and giving a talk on standards I’ll also be taking part in the closing panel session on Top Technology Trends for Libraries and Information Professionals.

What should I say, I wonder? Should I talk about the importance of social tools for resource discovery, using Twitter as an example of a tool whose success was unexpected.  Or shall I try and quickly gain an understanding on Google Wave and talk about its potential relevance to information professionals.

But doesn’t this approach simply repeat the technological determinism which the postdigital advocates point out has continually failed to deliver on its promises.

Instead I’m intending to take today’s environment as the starting point and explore how technological developments promise to take us towards a better world – in the 1990s.

Today’s Networked Environment

How can we summarise today’s environment, which provides the starting point for a journey towards the past? Let’s mention a few examples.

Twitter: It might be appropriate for  event aimed at the Library community to begin by talking about the success of Twitter, not only for providing community support but as a mechanism for resource sharing and resource discovery – yes, Twitter now seems to be a very effective tools for sharing links with one’s friends and colleagues.

Lightweight development: We now hear developers being critical of large-scale funding initiatives, preferring instead small amounts of funding to support rapid development work. The JISC’s recent Rapid Innovation Grants provided an example of a funding body recognising the benefits of such an approach.

Barcamps, Bathcamps, Hackfests, …: Proponents of light-weight development approaches also feel that meeting up with like-minded people, perhaps at weekends, can be a useful way of supporting one’s professional activities (and in the case of the recent Bathcamp, the weekend away also involved camping!)

Crowdsourcing: Examples such as the crowdsourcing of the digitisation of MP’s expenses claims, Galaxy Zoo, reCaptcha and other examples provide further illustrations of today’s networked environment, in which enthusiasts, who need not be developers, can achieve benefits which previously may not have been felt to be achievable without significant expenditure.

There is, of course, a political and social context to this technical environment – and, especially, for those working in the public sector, the context is the gloomy economic situation, an expectation that things will get even worse and a likely change of government in the near future.

Looking Forward to the 1990s

Let’s assume that, due to a malfunctioning (time) portal, we, like Benjamin Button, find ourselves  being taken backwards in time, in our case towards the 1990s.  How might the networked environment I have summarised above develop?  Here are my predictions:

Twitter: The sceptics who argued that Twitter doesn’t have a sustainable business model will be proved correct.  The Twitter service will die and, despite an attempt by Facebook to provide a simple type of service using its Status updates, the concept of ‘micro-blogging’ will disappear.  The  resulting productivity gains will be instrumental in helping the Twittering nations to move out of the global recession.

Lightweight development: The limitations of lightweight development approaches and simple (some say simplistic) formats such as RSS become apparent and, despite providing interesting exemplars, fail to provide an infrastructure for serious significant development work. ‘Enterprise development’ becomes the new ‘lightweight development’ and large-scale Content Management Systems become the popular with organisations facing pressures from their peers to deploy such technologies.

Barcamps, Bathcamps, Hackfests, …: The growth in large-scale enterprise development environment (accompanied by pressure from friends and families to achieve a more healthy work/life balance) brings to an end the culture of the amateur hacker and events such as barcamps, bathcamps and hackfests.

Crowdsourcing: The importance of the professional in the development of high quality networked services goes beyond the developer community. The failure of amateurs to provide the required  levels of quality for digitisation, metadata standards, etc. results in an appreciation of the merits of the professional.  Librarians and related information professionals become critical in the development of sustainable networked services.

Of course, as with many technological predictions, this vision of the 1990s is an optimistic one. Not only does the demise of social networks lead to an emphasis on real-world friends and relationships, but the political and economic environment will also see tremendous improvements – indeed I predict that in 10 years, or possibly 12 years time (say 1997), we will be very pleased with our political and economic situation and positive about the benefits that the future will bring.

Postscript

This post was influenced by the post-digital session which Dave White facilitated and Rich Hall as part of the fringe (#falt09) activities around the ALT-C 2009 conference. In a blog post about the session Dave White felt that “After the fringe session I was even more convinced that the post-digital was a useful concept but that we hadn’t found the right way of expressing it yet.“

John Maeda has described how “Recently I have had the sense that no matter what new digital territory may arise, we end up where we first began – back in an infinite loop. My instinctive response to this personal perception has been to proclaim a new effort to escape to the post digital . . . which I am certain lies in the past.”

Can we gain a better appreciation of our perhaps naive expectations of the benefits of technological developments by, as John suggests, looking back into the past?

Twitter Event Hashtagging Strategies

Background

In a recent post on the eFoundation’s blog Andy Powell wrote about “Flocking behaviour – why Twitter is for starlings, not buzzards“. Based on the statistics I had provided for use of  Twitter at the recent ALT C 2009 conference Andy picked up on the use of two tags (#altc2009 and #altc09) and pointed out that “if you don’t tweet using the generally agreed tag you are effectively invisible to much of the conference audience“.

I agree – so there’s probably a need to agree on  hashtagging strategies for events, which I’ll explore in this post. And I’ll use this as an opportunity to consider what hashtag UKOLN should be using for next year’s Institutional Web Management Workshop (IWMW 2010).

Issues To Consider

What are the issues to consider when selecting a hashtag for use at an event?

Being brief

The initial requirement is that as tweets are limited to 140 characters,  hashtags should be brief in order to maximise the amount of content that can be containing in a tweet about an event.

Avoiding problems with non-alpha-numeric characters

It may be felt desirable to avoid use of certain non-alphanumeric characters which may cause problems in some Twitter clients.  For example, the hashtag #clip2.0 was initially suggested for an event on the relevance of Web 2.0 technologies for the CILIP organisation and CILIP members. However Twitter clients seem to truncate hashtags containing a full stop, so the hashtag #cilip2 was used. Similar problems have been observed with use of a dash (-) as illustrated in the display of a tweet in the TweetDeck client. In addition there was a complaint that use of an underscore (_) in the #cilip_lams event caused usability problems, especially on mobile devices. The advice would seem to be stick with alphanumeric characters in hashtags.

Avoid numbers at the start of hashtags

Hashtags which begin with a number (e.g. #2009foo ) are believed to cause hyperlinking problems in some clients.

Should you be consistent with other tagging services?

Although those who make intensive use of Twitter may feel that the first two points are all that need to be considered when formulating a hashtag for an event, there may be an argument for being consistent with recommendations for tags using in other environments such as other Flickr, YouTube, etc. These services do not suffer for the length constraints imposed by Twitter and so can provide more flexibility. There may be an argument for using a Twitter-safe hashtag in these other services, but what if these other services are the more widely-used services (e.g. events with an established use of Flickr)?

Should the year be included?

Many of the events I’ve attended or followed on Twitter have included the year in the hashtag (e.g. #iwmw2009, #altc2009 and #solo09) but some have not (#alpsp and #cilip_lams). Does the year have to be included, especially as the tweets will be readily accessible via the Twitter search APIs for only a short period?  But might a decision to save space by omitting the year cause problems if the Twitter API changes or other tools are used? And might this cause additional confusions with tags for which date encoding may be useful.

One hashtag or several?

If there are multiple events associated with a main event (e.g. pre-conference workshops or fringe events) you will need to consider whether to recommend use of the main event hashtag for these peripheral events or to suggest an alternative hashtag.

Branding issues

There may be pressure to ensure that an event hasthtag provides the correct branding for the organising bodies. The hashtag for the CILIP’s Umbrella 2009 conference, for example, was #cilipumbrella.

Multi-lingual issues

Welsh institutions  may need to consider use of bilingual hashtags. Note, for example, that for the CILIP Wales 2009 conference the conference hashtag was cilip-cymru09. I should add, however, that I haven’t any experience of the implications of use of non Latin characters (ironically, as Im (sic) typing this sentence on a Croatian keyboard and cant find the single quote character!)

Being memorable

Perhaps because I’m getting older I am finding it difficult to remember random strings of characters – so I wouldn’t appreciate a tag such as #xuj740n9 (having to re-authenticate a username and password with a similar pattern can also be irritating). I found the hashtags used for the recent Oxford Social Media Conference (#oxsmc09) and Science Online London (#solo09) events easy to remember  as the conference names themselves were memorable.

Being different

Having an event hashtag which could clashes with other hashtags is likely to lead to confusion.

Avoiding ambiguities in the characters

Many years ago I was an information officer and I was very aware of the need to avoid confusions between characters such as 1 and i and o and 0 (in some fonts these many be indistinguishable). Note that this may be very relevant for events held next year. The (fictitious) Input Output’s annual conference hashtag #io10 could be particularly confusing depending on the font used on your computer.

Being timely and promoting the hashtag effectively

As mentioned recently, it is important to finalise a hashtag in advance of the event and to ensure that participants and other interested parties are aware of the official hashtag for the event. In many cases participants are likely to tweet about an event prior to the event, perhaps when a call for paper has been published e.g. “Looking for partners to write a proposal for #altc2010 with“.

Obtaining buy-in from users of the tag

As it is not possible to mandate use of an official event hashtag you should seek to ensure that users of the tag will be inclined to use the hashtag. If the hashtag is too long the users may choose to use a shorter one.

Explaining the tag

As well as promoting the hashtag to the event participants you should also try to ensure that other interested parties, who perhaps might notice a stream of tweets with the tag, can easily discover more about the associated event.  One way of doing this might be to ensure that a Web page containing details of the hashtag and the event is published early so that it may be indexed by Google. In addition it may be useful to describe the event in Twitter aggregation services such as WThashtag (e.g. see the description for the IWMW 2009 event).

#iwmw2010, #iwmw10, #iwmw – or something else?

This post has described some of the issues which should be considered when choosing an event hashtag. But to put such discussions into context, I’d like to consider the hashtag UKOLN should be using for next year’s Institutional Web Management Workshop (IWMW 2010) – the fourteenth in this series of annual events for members of institutional Web management teams.

I’ve recently attended four events which had a Twitter hashtag, each of which took a different approach: #altc2009, #techshare09, #alpsp and #cilip_lams.

As there aren’t pressures to brand our host institution, UKOLN, there’s no need for a ‘#ukoln_iwmw” style tag. The options, and arguments for and against, are therefore:

#iwmw2010
For:  Consistency with previous years and consistency with tags used in Flickr, YouTube, etc. Also consistency with URL used on UKOLN Web site.
Against: Uses 9 characters – this could be shorter.

#iwmw10
For: Saves two characters over #iwmw2010.
Against: Loses consistency with previous years and with other tag services. Possible confusion over the characters (could it be confused with #iwmwi0?)

#iwmw
For: Saves four characters over #iwmw2010. No confusion with the ’10′ characters.
Against: Loses consistency with previous years and with other tag services. Loss of the date may cause problems if data is to be used in content of other years (but not necessarily so as the tweets do have a machine-readable date)

What do you think we should go for? And are there other issues one should consider when choosing a hashtag for an event which I haven’t mentioned?

Guest Post: Blogs At Imperial College

After a gap of 11 months the guest blog post returns with a post by Jenny Evans, Liaison Librarian: Maths and Physics at Imperial College. Jenny provides a background to two blogs (to support the Physics and Maths and Engineering departments) which were set up by liaison librarians in 2006 and answers many of the questions which librarians in a similar role may be asking: how did you get agreement from the management?; who contributes; what is the target audience; what do you write about; how long does it take to support; is it sustainable and, perhaps most importantly, can the blog service be regarded as a success?

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About Imperial

Imperial College London is a science-focussed institution with a reputation for excellence in teaching and research with approximately 12,000 full time students.  The Library comprises the Central Library and the Mathematics Department Library, located on our South Kensington campus, as well as campus libraries at Charing Cross Hospital, St Mary’s Hospital, Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, Brompton Hospital, Hammersmith Hospital and Silwood Park.

Background

Our first two blogs were created by liaison librarians, Ruth Harrison and myself, in March 2006. There were three main reasons we considered using a blog.

Firstly, we had tried sending out emails and newsletters to departments informing them of relevant developments.  Problems with this method included academics wanting different formats, or complaining about email overload.  From our perspective, as a newsletter tended to be produced only once a term, information we wanted to get out to them quickly was often out of date by the time it was sent.

There was the option of adding pages to the library website, however this relied on us getting information to another library staff member, and then waiting for them to put the page up.  Which if you needed to get information out to staff/students quickly was not the ideal solution.

Finally, the library Web site doesn’t provide detailed subject specific information pages, which academics had complained about to us, so we wanted to address this issue – the blogs were a way in which we could provide very specific information and only to those people who wanted it.

As such, we felt a blog would be an ideal way to be able to communicate quickly, effectively and directly with our respective departments about information that was relevant to them. Blogs would enable us to post content as we needed to, they would be easy to set up and maintain, and we could delegate responsibility to staff where appropriate.  It also meant academics could set up an RSS feed to the pages so they could control how they viewed the information.

WordPress software

We decided to start the blogs using the free blogging software from WordPress.  It was a fairly new option at the time, but it was getting good reviews, seemed to be flexible, offered some useful features and was free.

Getting agreement from management

Working on the assumption that it is much easier to sell an idea that you can demonstrate we created a working prototype and began posting content to the blogs before presenting them to our respective managers.  They then took them to the relevant management meetings.  Although there was some unease about the lack of branding, and the idea that at the time not all liaison librarians would have a blog, it was agreed that as this was a form of communication, specific to a liaison librarian and their department (not unlike email) that we could continue.

Over the past 3 1/2 years, other liaison librarians have seen the success of our blogs and have created their own.  We now have thirteen blogs covering a variety of subject areas.  There is currently no specific ‘library style’ for the blogs, although some look more ‘Imperial-like’ than others.

Blog authors

Our blog authors are a mix of library staff – though all work in Library’s Faculty Support Services for Teaching and Research Directorate – as the blogs are aimed staff and students in specific departments/subject areas.  As such, the relevant library liaison team are responsible for the blog.  This could be a single person or more than one member of the same team.  Our medicine blog is aimed at all medical staff and students and as such members of staff from all of the medical campuses contribute to this blog.

Target audience

Each of our blogs has a different target audience, depending on what is thought appropriate for that subject area.  This can include:

• Academic/research staff
• Postgraduate research students
• Postgraduate taught course students
• Undergraduate students

For example the maths and physics blog that I am responsible for (as I’m no longer responsible for chemistry) is aimed at academic and research staff, and research post-graduate students, although some content is relevant to post-graduate taught course students and I do make them aware of its existence.  It is not so relevant to the undergraduate students, however I do have a maths projects blog I have created to support the projects they work on in the first and second year of their course.

Content

This is also something that relies on the particular person or group of people responsible for each blog.

Examples of what people include in their blogs:

• New resources including new book purchases and journal subscriptions
• News
• Custom search engines
• Journal citation reports/bibliometrics information
• Help/advice pages
• Support for teaching sessions
• Identifying key resources such as e-books
• Highlighting relevant parts of the library website
• Highlighting the physical location of relevant collections
• Overview of relevant key database and referencing information

Generally, we would try not to duplicate information found on the library Web site, but do highlight relevant content.

How long we spend maintaining our blogs

As you can imagine, this differs depending on who is working on the blog.  I did a quick survey of fellow bloggers as to how often they post on their blogs and this ranges from a couple of times a week to once a month.  Personally, I must confess I don’t spend as much time on mine as I used to, though my team member Katie does most of the posting these days.

Publicity/Marketing

You can find a link to our blogs on our library homepage and there is also a link from the College blogs page.  I’ve also got links on the Physics department website and the Maths Library web page.

For my blog, I email department staff, PhD students and MSc students at least once a term, reminding them the blog is there and highlighting any current news. Some bloggers use Feedburner which enables them to give people the option to receive updates by email.

Our Life Sciences team introduce their blogs to students in induction sessions and point out useful features.

This is possibly something we could market better than we do so at the moment. Suggestions from fellow bloggers include giving them a higher profile, making them more visually appealing, perhaps giving them a similar style/layout.

Success?

As a whole our blogs have been very successful – they are all getting used.  They enable us to raise our profile as liaison librarians within the departments we work with, and provide our users with a resource that is specific to their areas of expertise.

In the words of one of our Life Sciences bloggers:

“Subject blogs are an ideal way to gather relevant subject specific material together in one place for your staff and students, they can be tailored and expanded to meet the need and are much more flexible than having to coordinate an official webpage update. We introduce our students to them in inductions and point out useful areas such as ‘Finding Books’ (which is a well-used page) and Academic Writing Skills (another well-used page which lists academic writing skills books in the library with links to the catalogue – this really picked up over the summer when Masters students were focussing on writing up).“

The statistics available via WordPress do enable you to see details about how many people are viewing your blog, who is referring to your blog, what the top posts and pages are, search terms people are using to find you, and what people are clicking on and incoming links.  However, this doesn’t include RSS feeds (unless you are using Feedburner).  And these statistics do demonstrate that our blogs are being used.

Personally, I didn’t expect loads of comments on my blog – I use it more as a means of getting relevant information out to my departments (maths and physics) – however I do encourage people to get in contact via the comments mechanism of the blog. I have installed a MeeboMe widget on my blog which hasn’t had a great deal of use (though the widget I installed on the blog I created for my maths undergraduate students has had a few enquiries). My humanities colleague has also tried MeeboMe with limited success.

Our Life Sciences team has noticed that the more time they have invested in “developing, populating and marketing (not to mention regularly updating) the blog has seen a continued growth in usage figures”.

Another unexpected outcome has been the interest from third parties such as Victor Hemming from Mendeley who had seen “posts we had put up about referencing and networking for researchers. This initial contact led to Mendeley coming to Imperial to give a personal introduction. It was good to know that our blog was attracting the attention of useful people and sending them in our direction”.

Sustainability

Our blogs have been running for 3 and half years now and show no signs of slowing down. The bloggers I have been in touch with all feel that it is worth the time they spend maintaining and updating them.

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Jenny Evans,
Liaison Librarian: Maths and Physics
Imperial College
London
Email: j.evans@imperial.ac.uk
Blog: http://physmaths.wordpress.com/