How Blogs Can Help Museums To Engage With Their Users

In a recent blog post on the Cultural Interpretation & Creative Education blog Bridget McKenzie summarised the MLA and HLF views on 21st C Curation which were presented at a seminar given at UCL on 30^th April 2008.

Carole Souter, CEO of the HLF informed the audience that “‘We’re getting tough with people” and went on to say that “If you tell us that 200,000 more people are going to look at your website because of it, well, so what? How do you know they have really been engaged?“. The importance of user engagement was echoed by Roy Clare, CEO of MLA. In a comment on a project funded by the NOF-digitise programme he asked: “How they [the users] would engage with it?“.

I am really pleased that such views are being expressed so clearly by senior managers of public sector bodies. In the past I’ve been concerned an an emphasis on blunt usage statistics. But now the emphasis in the museums sector is on the quality of the user experience and user engagement. And, as Bridget observed, Carole Souter’s “suggestion was that if you are going to include digitisation into an HLF bid, it would have to involve people in specific thematic projects of local interest“.

If funding will only be available for digitisation projects which enable users to actively engage with the digitised content, then this, to me, seems to be sending strong signals that a Web 2.0 approach should be taken.

And one approach to enable users to be able to engage with the content is through the provision of blogs as, in a UK context, Ingrid Beazley demonstrated at the Museums and the Web 2008 conference with a session entitled “Reach new audiences, increase numbers of visitors, and become a major part of the local community by using online social networking sites and blogs“. As described in her abstract Dulwich Picture Gallery has “experienced marked successes with our user driven, dialogue friendly Facebook and Flickr sites” and “there is considerable buzz around our plans for 2008, including the launch of our online magazine blog with which we are building a Gallery associated community“.

But how should museums go about establishing and sustaining their blogs - and also exploiting the potential of social networking services? Well I’m pleased to say that this is a topic I will be talking about at the Museum Heritage 2008 show at London Olympia on Wednesday 7^th May 2008. If any readers of this blog from the museus sector are planning to attend this event, I’d love to chat with you. But if you can’t attend, then my slides are available on Slideshare - and are also embedded in this blog post.

Your feedback is welcome.

Distributed Discussions On Repositories

The Repositories Debate

Andy Powell recently wrote a post on the eFoundations blog about his opening plenary talk at the VALA 2008 conference.

His post generated interesting discussions and debate amongst those involved in repository activities in the UK and the wider community. Paul Miller was in agreement with Andy’s comments in his post on the Panlibus blog entitled “Andy Powell is Spot On” with Paul feeling that “Our current approach, fundamentally, is totally, completely, utterly wrong, isn’t it?”.

Over on his blog my colleague Paul Walk has given his thoughts on Andy’s post expressing agreement in several areas but disagreeing with Andy’s view that “we need to focus on building and/or using global scholarly social networks based on global repository services“. Paul (W) responds by asking “Why can’t we “focus on building and/or using global scholarly social networks” (which I support) based on institutional repository services? We don’t have a problem with institutional web sites do we? Or institutional library OPACs?”. My former colleague Rachel Heery has responded in a similar vein to Paul in a response to Andy’s post: “I don’t really see that there is conflict between encouraging more content going into institutional repositories and ambitions to provide more Web 2.0 type services on top of aggregated IR content. Surely these things go together?“.

Meanwhile over on his Overdue Ideas blog Owen Stephens gives his thoughts from the perspective of a practitioner involved in setting up the Spir@l institutional repository at Imperial College with a wittily-titled post “R.I.Positories“. Owen concludes “we need is a system that helps us administer the workflow around the delivery of digital objects in a corporate environment, but that is invisible to those not involved in the administration - and that’s what I want out of a ‘repository’ - so, for me, the Repository is dead, long live the repository“.

And a few minutes ago I noticed a pop-up alert informing me of a blog post entitled “RESTful Repositories?“. An intriguing title, I thought, so I viewed the post and came across Stu Weibel’s contribution which suggested that “One way to think about repositories is as the bookshelves of the digital library“. Stu went on to point out that “We don’t ask scholars, having just published an article or book, to ‘go to the library to find the most appropriate place for it… and don’t come back until you do!’“   This sounds reasonable to me - there’s a need for the physical library and the infrastructure that is associated with it, but the researchers don’t need to know how it works. This might be an approach to be taken with institutional repositories - so let’s not scare them off with the ins and outs of the metadata schemas.

Engaging With A Distributed Debate

There’s clearly an interesting debate taking place around the approaches which should be taken to maximising access to the UK’s research papers. But if you have an interest in institutional repositories how do you find out where the debate is taking place and how do you participate?

I have had discussions with colleagues who feel that such debates should be centralised and should use a ubiquitous communications channel - namely email. From this perspective the debate about institutional repositories within the UK higher education community should take place on the JISC-Repositories JISCMail list. However I feel that this will result in the debate being marginalised to those with a particularly strong interest in repositories, will tend to focus on the nitty-gritty details which email tends to encourage and, in the case of JISCMail, the debate will be trapped within the JISCMail Web site, not only because the JISCMail archives are not exposed to search engines such as Google, but also because of the ‘uncool’ URIs for messages in the archive.

And, of course, email discussions fragment, in any case, and I suspect the Australian participants at the VALA 2008 conference will be having their own discussions about repositories on their own mailing lists.

An alternative view is that the debate with take place via scholarly articles published in peer-reviewed journals. This may be the case in many areas of research, but man in the digital library community would be frustrated by the lengthy timescales that process would entail.

Like it or not, the debate is taking place using a variety of communications tools, including the blogosphere.

So, if you wish to engage with such discussions, how do you find out what is happening? In my case my RSS reader (Feedreader) will automatically inform me of new posts for the blogs I’ve subscribed to. This includes the eFoundations blog, although in the case of Andy’s post I was alerted to its publication a couple of hours after it had been published via a tweet on Twitter.

The distributed nature of such debates has benefit, such as allowing the discussions to be brought to the attention of different communities. When doing this, there is an expectation that bloggers will link to the original post. And if blogs allow trackbacks, it will be possible to follow links from an original post to blogs which have commented on it.

Returning to Andy’s original post, Paul Walk noticed that the eFoundation’s blog hadn’t included a trackback to Paul’s post. This is probably a technical glitch - but this incident made me think about the importance of trackbacks in the integration of distributed discussions. Owen Stephen’s R.I.P.ositories post included a link to a post on The importance of being open the eFoundation blog dating back to October 2006. But comments to such old posts are disabled - I assume to minimise the effort in deleting spam comments. But this is breaking the linkages to related discussions. How, then, should we balance the benefits of allowing such tracebacks versus the maintenance costs of managing misuse?  Or do you disagree with blogs being used for this type of discussion and debate?

IT Service Blogs

In a post last month entitled UCISA Award for UK Web Focus Blog I mentioned that I’ll be giving a talk on blogging at a UCISA workshop an Innovation and Communication which will take place on Thursday 14^th February 2008.

I’m currently finalising my slides - which, incidentally, are available on the event’s Wetpaint wiki. On a discussion on the wiki Sue Cunningham asked: “One of the reasons people in our dept don’t want to start blogging is that they don’t think they would keep it up. Do you find it takes a lot of your time - is it difficult to post on a regular basis?“

I would suggest that (a) blogs can be used to replace or complement existing communications channels and provide greater functionality (b) IT Services need to give greater priority to engaging with their users, otherwise the users will stop using their services and (c) we don’t have to work in isolation and sharing experiences and resources, such as blog policies, scripts, etc. and discussing best practices will benefit the wider community and is something that UCISA is good at.

My questions then:

• What IT Services blogs are available (I’m aware of the Tech Services blog at Edge Hill University, Michael Webb’s at Newport and John Dale’s at Warwick) ?
• What experiences and best practices can be shared. Have any IT Service departments produced guidelines on the scope of their blogs, avoiding problems, dealing with spam comments, etc.?

The current version of my slides is available below (although this may be updated).

UCISA Award for UK Web Focus Blog

I’m pleased to report that the UK Web Focus blog was awarded a prize by UCISA (Universities and Colleges Information Systems Association). This blog will feature as a case study which will appear in a forthcoming UCISA Innovation and Communication best practice guide to be published by the Communications, Liaison and Information Working Group of TLIG (the UCISA Teaching Learning and Information Group).

As well as the publication, UCISA is also organising an Innovation and Communication event which will feature the selected case studies. The event, which will be held on 14 February 2008 at the Coventry TechnoCentre, will also include presentations on A Blended Communication Approach (Nici Cooper, University of Wolverhampton), Hi Applicant Community website(Alison Wildish, Edge Hill University - but now based at Bath University), IT Communications (Derek Norris, University of the West of England) and The Teaching and Learning Network (Phil Riding, UCL) .

I am particularly interested in the potential of blogs for staff in IT Service departments to both engage with their user communities and for communicating with their peers in IT Service departments in other institutions. The early adopters in IT Service departments include blogs from several senior managers (Michael Webb, University of Wales, Newport, John Dale, University of Warwick and, more recently, Chris Sexton, Sheffield University) with Mark Sammons (whose In-Cider Knowledge blog was established in 2004, and has migrated to WordPress recently) providing the perspective from a member of IT Services support staff.

Last May I published a post on The First IT Services Blog? which suggested that the Core Services departtment at Edge Hill Univrersity might be the best IT Service department to have launched a blogging service. But are there now more IT Service departments who are making use of blogs to reach out to their users? And have blog policies and Web practices been established? I’d welcome feedback which I can make use of when I give my talk at the UCISA event.

Exploiting The Potential Of Blogs and Social Networks

The Event

The UKOLN workshop on “Exploiting The Potential Of Blogs and Social Networks” took place yesterday at Austin Court, Birmingham.

This event was initially meant to be held in March 2007, with the title “Exploiting The Potential Of Blogs“. However as we discovered a clash with the UCISA annual conference, we decided to postpone the event until November. And by the time we got around to selecting the talks it had become clear that it was the area of social networks which was exciting (and terrifying) many people. Providing a wider focus for the event proved popular with the event being fully-subscribed with 100 participants, rather than the 60-70 we had originally planned for.

The Talks

The talks at the event provided a narrative which outlined the variety of approaches which institutions are taking in provision of and/or use of blogs and social network services. After my initial introduction to the workshop Stephen Clarke (University of Birmingham) gave the opening plenary talk on Blogging In A Managed Environment in which he described the benefits which can be gained by supporting student learning though use of a managed application environment (which, at the University of Birmingham, is Web CT). Melissa Highton (University of Leeds) focussed on supporting the teachers in her talk on Leedsfeed: a Blogging Service based on the Open Source Elgg Application, again through use of an in-house application.

In contrast Alison Wildish (Edge Hill University) suggested that institutions need to Put Yourself Out There- and at her institution this means recognising that students (and potential students) will use services such as Facebook, and so the institution needs to respond to this by making its information available in such places.

It was appropriate that Alison’s talk was followed by Tom Milburn, Vice-President, Education at the University of Bath Students Union. In his talk on The Student Perspective. Tom gave a valuable insight into ways in which students at the University of Bath are setting up Facebook groups which can “provide students with the support of their cohort in a structured environment, … provide constant support that is not bound by office hours and … ease pressure on staff with older students helping to ‘teach’ younger students.” Tom also described the pro-active approach being taken by the students Union in advising students of the potential dangers which may be posed by social networks. In particular he described the Facebook flyers (adverts displayed in Facebook) which were made available to students in the University of Bath Facebook network. Interestingly Tom concluded that effective use of social networks “will depend on how much effort staff put in and the culture of students on various courses“. At the University of Bath it would seem that students may welcome staff supporting their use of Facebook.

After lunch there were two talks given the institutional IT Services perspective. Stuart Lee (University of Oxford) described The Hidden Dangers of Social Networks: You can log-on but you cannot hide. Interestingly the slides (which I had uploaded to Slideshare prior to the event) had been commented upon by Grainne Conole and AJCann, with the suggestion that IT services were scared of these dangers - although Stuart’s intentions (which he described in his responses to these comments) was to discharge the responsibility of a service department “to point out hidden pitfalls in some systems that users need to be aware of“.

In the final talk David Harrison (University of Cardiff) described how the University of Cardiff is seeking to respond to Disruptive Technology and its Implications for University Information Services. David described how his work in this area began as “a response to a presentation from Brian Kelly and John Heaps at an earlier UKOLN Workshop” (Initiatives & Innovation: Managing Disruptive Technologies, a joint UKOLN/CETIS/UCISA workshop held in February 2006). An initial draft of a briefing paper was written in early 2007 for comment within UCISA Executive, and part 1 of the briefing paper is now available. David’s concluding remarks included:

• Users need protecting against their own foolishness - thus EDUCATION is the most important thing
• Institutions should begin to trust their staff and students more but be also prepared to use existing disciplinary codes where the trust is betrayed
• Must embrace and engage – to do otherwise would be counter-productive and make us look foolish – consider the concept of enablement
• Should consider a partnership rather than service provider role and be customer-centric

The Participants’ Perspectives

As with many of UKOLN’s recent events we encouraged participants to make use of the WiFi network to enhance their learning at the event, to make use of a wiki for keeping notes of the discussion groups and to share their blog posts, photographs, etc. related to the event.

Chris Sexton, who kindly helped out in in the final summing up session, was very productive during the day, with posts of the morning session (part 1) , morning session (part 2) and afternoon session. Matt Machell, on his Eclectic Dreams Blog also provided useful summaries of the morning and afternoon sessions. If there are any further blog posts about the event which I’ve missed, please let me know and I’ll include details here (note I came across reports on the Digital Narratives blog, the DMU PatherFinder blog and Helen Newham’s blog after publishing this report).

I should also add that a Wetpaint wiki site was used to support the event. The notes from the discussion groups may be of particular interest, both to the workshop participants and to those who could attend.

The Remote Participants

UKOLN has been evaluating a variety of tools recently which can be use to ‘amplify’ the discussions and outputs of the events we run. Plenary talks at the IWMW 2007 event were streamed. At this event we went one step further, providing not only a video stream but also streaming the video into Second Life. I would like to thank Andy Powell, Eduserv Foundation for managing these video streams, and Veodia for making their streaming service available for us to evaluate during the event. We did have some hiccups with the service - due, we think, to the limited bandwidth for streaming out of the venue. However this was a valuable experiment, I feel. Andy has also provided some slides which review his experiences (and, after this post was initially published, gave his Reflections on a DIY streaming experience).

What Next?

In a recent post on When Two Tribes Go To War I described the tensions between two communities of developers: those who believe that The VLE/LMS is dead and those who are engaged in providing a secure managed VLE environment. At this event we came across two communities in a slightly different guise: the IT service providers who feel that their institution should be managing its IT provision and those who feel that institutions cannot compete with the popularity of many commercially provided solutions. The good news, is there was very much a willingness to discuss the pros and cons of both positions, and an awareness that each side has its own weaknesses. There’s still a lot of mileage in this debate, I feel.

Guest Blog Post: Blogging Masterclass at ILI 2007: A Perspective

In the second guest blog post of the month Eddie Byrne gives his thoughts on the Blog Masterclass facilitated recently by myself and Kara Jones.

Eddie Byrne is Senior Librarian with Dublin City Public Libraries with responsibility for Web Services. A graduate of University College Dublin School of Library and Information Studies, he has worked for many years in the public library sector. From 2000-2002 he served as Metadata Project Co-ordinator for the Irish public service.

Eddie’s review of the workshop, in which he describes the promotional video for the event, the structure of the workshop and the workshop materials, may be of particular interest to those who work in public libraries, museums and archives, as UKOLN is in the process of developing a series of events and briefing documents to support this community. It is particularly pleasing to receive this evidence of the success of the event.

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Having flown into London on the morning of Sunday, 7^th October, the scene was now a familiar one for me, as I made my way from Heathrow to the Copthorne Tara Hotel in Kensington for the 9^th Internet Librarian International 2007 conference. Familiar, as this was my third appearance on the trot at the conference, and familiar also as when I first came to London way back in the last century (!) having left school, I headed for my first ‘real’ job (read ’summer job’) and, where do you think it was, yes, in the Copthorne Tara Hotel in Kensington of course! Now the less said about that the better, let’s just say I was starting at the bottom! Three days there and I cracked! Peculiarly enough, my visits to the Copthorne Tara have on each occasion since also been of approx. three days duration. But those visits have been much more satisfying, let me add! I was attending the afternoon masterclass entitled ‘Using Blogs Effectively Within Your Library‘ and being given by Brian Kelly (UKOLN) and Kara Jones (University of Bath). Brian of course I was familiar with from last year, and from following his blog; Kara was new to me, but her ‘performance’ in selling the course to me on a VCasmo multimedia announcement was, let me add, a determining factor! This class appealed to me largely because the blurb in the programme included the words ‘practical’ and ’sustainable’, and was also going to talk about ‘real user experiences’. Kara also mentioned in the VCasmo announcement others crucial elements such as ‘good practices‘ and ‘things that work and things that don’t‘. I was sold!

The first thing I must say is that the class had an agreeable format, with Kara and Brian interchanging in order to keep us attentive and on our toes (or rather the edge of our seats, seats were provided)! I also welcomed the multiple handouts distributed during the class - it saved one having to take copious notes, thereby freeing one up to do some ‘active’ listening and actually participate. Simple but invaluable. Kara also introduced a little technological gizmo that allowed her to poll participants to get their input at various points, fun and functional at the same time.

We involved ourselves in a number of exercises; one to identify possible blog uses and the benefits to be accrued, another to identify potential barriers, those we thought could be easily addressed, and those that presented greater challenges. The fruits of our labour were posted to the class wiki (in real time!), so I won’t reproduce them here, they can be seen over on the WetPaint wiki. Also, in this context, Kara’s presentation entitled “Why Have a Blog?” was particularly good in covering all the angles.

It is worth saying at this point that what I found of particular value was Kara’s and Brian’s use of the Web as a delivery platform and as a means of networking with potential participants prior to the conference. The social network platfom ‘Ning’ was used in this context in order to illicit user experiences that would contribute to the substance of the class. Some of the presentations were available on ‘Slideshare’ prior to the conference and others on ‘Google Presents’ immediately afterwards; making presentations available in this manner can be of great advantage to participants preparing in advance or reviewing material afterwards.

Many other topics were of course covered in the masterclass: blog basics; the technical issues in setting up and maintaining a blog (hosting, software, look and feel); launching and monitoring your blog (marketing, statistics); evaluation (role, policies, feedback); and more besides. What is of particular value in a workshop or masterclass such as this is that you are required to do some critical thinking, and you also get the invaluable perspective of others, those working in different areas, and therefore bringing a different perspective, as well as those who have tried something, been there, done that. I found it interesting to note that, despite the participants working in diverse areas and coming from different backgrounds, there was a commonality in terms of issues, concerns, perceived opportunities, and most of all a shared enthusiasm for using a tool that facilitates communication, user participation, user engagement, collaboration, and resource building.

If I can refer to that word ‘practical’ again, this class was that. From forcing us to ask ourselves the ‘why’ of doing it, the ‘how’ to doing it, to the ‘watch out’ while doing it. I particularly liked Brian’s suggestion of having a documented blog policy - I think it becomes so much easier for you, your organisation and your users if you have it down on paper (remember paper?). It clarifies so much. Stating the purpose and scope of your organisation’s blog, the intended audience, policy on comments and third party use. I also welcomed the focus on demonstrating value, using evidence to justify the setting up of a blog in the first place: analysing your blog statistics and seeking feedback, asking the user for their views on the blog and how it may better serve them. Brian recently involved himself in such an exercise on his blog, and the results make interesting reading. He provided a handout with those too!

The suggestion was put forward during the class that one should experiment with blogs for particular events or occasions. That to do so gave a taste of the strengths and opportunities of blogs. I would go further. They are more than just experimental, a one-off event of note, or a particular programme with a short-term lifespan, are ideal candidates of themselves for blogs in my estimation; they are relatively easy and quick to set up, involve little in the way of overheads, and are as easily de-activated should you want to when the event is over (I favour leaving the blog visible as a testament to the event and as a permanent record). And there is always a high profile event around the corner that merits its own blog. I indeed make widespread use of them in my library service. And whereas they do help inform and guide you in implementing other blogs in your organisation, their existence is no less important than that permanent presence you desire with your ‘lead’ blog. Is it contradictory to say that the temporary blog is here to stay?

Guest Blog Post: The ILI 2007 Blog Masterclass

The Month’s Guest Blog Post

The guest blog spot for November provides an opportunity to hear from participants at an event I have participated at recently. We start with Pernille Helholm’s reflections on the half day Blogging Masterclass facilitated by myself and Kara Jones.

About Me

I work at a large company within the medical device industry in Copenhagen, Denmark. I am a (solo) librarian, information specialist and furthermore I attend The Master of Library and Information Science programme at The Danish School of librarianship.

At work my tasks are providing competitor surveillance, scientific searches, patent searches, supplying our users with all kind of information in the form of journal, books, web pages, etc. and to guide them through the various systems.

Furthermore (and very important!) I have to develop the library services all the time. I also have a blog at pnille.wordpress.com

The Guest Blog Post

Last year at Internet Librarian International 2006 I discovered a new world of social software, new and easy ways of communicating, the concept of sharing and some great new aspects of librarianship. So this year I signed up for the ILI2007 conference without hesitation. It was obvious to me, that I should attend the pre-conference Masterclass on Using Blogs Effectively within Your Organisation facilitated by Brian Kelly and Kara Jones.

During the past year I had explored many of the new social software tools and with the help of blogs, RSS, and online friends I constantly discovered new possibilities! And from all those tools I really find that blogging can be a very useful tool in an organisation like the one I work for.

I can see that it would be an excellent way for people within the organisation to share ideas, look for solutions to old and new problems, generate and administrate new ideas that lead to innovation.

Therefore, I decided that my goals for this masterclass were to bring home ideas and inspiration about blogging and share it with my organisation.

But how, where and when do I begin? Brian and Kara’s masterclass was right on target for finding answers to my questions. And I am happy to say, it was an absolute highlight at the conference for me. I have made a list of things that I particularly liked:

• The practical angle and down to earth approach.
• Our hosts talked about their personal experiences with blogging, which made it easy to relate to.
• They managed to involve the attendants with “voting” and group assignments.
• The handouts! Very practical and condensed format. Not just copies of the slides! Useful!
• The laughs and the relaxed, personal attitude of the speakers.
• The many good points they had to convince management and co-workers.
• The wiki that Kara updated with our input.
• That sometimes, it’s better to ask for forgiveness than to beg for permission.

I can find very few points for improvement, other than that it was much too short. I think that a full day with hands-on training would be very suitable. And for the next time I think it would be better to sit in an U-shape to improve interaction between the participants. I went back to my hotel with many thoughts in mind and I found that this Masterclass did give me answers to my questions of how, where and when to begin, plus a lot more! What I learned at the Masterclass has given me inspiration to start as soon as I get back to work

As I already described, I believe that blogging will be great for the company. But now I can put words and action to my thoughts. And I think the right way to start will be to get rid of my old one-way-information-intranet-web page and replace it with a blog. I decided, not to wait for permission from our IT department.

Practically, I will install a WordPress blog on an in-house server, so that I can keep the - often confidential - information between the walls of the company. I can use the features of a blog to share news otherwise distributed by mail and I can make additional pages for other content. After the initial launch of the blog, this will provide a great opportunity to start teaching my users about RSS in order to receive the library news on their desktop!

In a way you could call it a pilot project for internal blogging. It is going to be a great showcase for my users, and I am so sure that it will make a lot of people interested in blogging as a tool for the company!

And if anyone from the management or other sceptics will ask “What’s the big deal about blogging?” or “Why do we need one?” or “What’s wrong with e-mail?”, I will know what to answer!

The First Year Of The UK Web Focus Blog

A Look Back

The UK Web Focus blog was set up on 1^st November 2006.  After its first year in operation I feel it would be appropriate to document some of the statistics, especially as I have previously promised to use this blog to document such quantitative data, for use by others. 

Usage

The blog’s Web site saw a steady growth in usage until March 2007, when usage stabilised at around 4,200 user visits per month, with a peak in July, due, I suspect, to visits from participants at the IWMW 2007 event.

I had previously noted a higher than expected takeup of the blog’s RSS feed. Unfortunately some time ago WordPress stopped providing access to the RSS feed statistics. This means that I am unable to provide any more detailed usage figures for the blog.

The blog is also aggregated in several locations, including the My Blog Log service, JISC OSS Watch’s Planet Aggregator and the JISC Emerge Web site.

The MyBlogLog service seems to be successful in providing access to, I suspect, a US audience, with 1,048 page views by 650 readers in the week of 23-28^th October 2007.

Content

There have been 264 posts during the year, with 1,045 comments. This average of about 4 comments per post seems to have been fairly consistent throughout the year (although, as Pete Johnston commented recently, this can be a slightly contentious metric for indicating engagement, potentially leading to accusations that typos are created deliberately in order to generate responses!).

A total of 32 tags have been used to categorise the posts. I have to admit that looking at the tags reminds me that the content covered in blog posts probably doesn’t reflect my original intentions, which I thought would provide more posts on technical digital library issues. However, in order to make the most effective use of the time I have spend on the blog, I have used the blog to reflect my other work activities. As this year has seen a focus on supporting the museums, libraries and archives community, I have given a priority to reflecting their main areas of interest.  And I’ve been pleased to see that the blog has been warmly appreciated within this sector, and has been successful in having an impact on the plans made by such organisations.

Looking To The Future

A user survey of the blog was carried out recently and a summary of the responses has been provided.  After a year of blogging and, on reflecting on the various feedback I’ve received, it seems to me that I’ll need to give some thought to perhaps creating a new blog, in order to address the diverse user community which UKOLN serves.  I will also need to give some thought to the implications of the implications of this blog being aggregated elsewhere: at one stage I removed the blog from the JISC Emerge Web site, but restored it after complaints from members of the JISC Emerge community. How should, for example, one reconcile the tensions between providing views which some members of a community may find useful and being part of a bearded group of middle-aged blog spammers:-)

The other area I plan on devoting more time to in the forthcoming year are ways of measuring the impact of Web 2.0 services such as blogs, moving beyond the usage statistics and user evaluation.

The Blogging Librarian: Pragmatic, Connected and Visible

In a guest blog post for November Michael Stephens gives his thoughts on the Blogging Librarian. Michael is well-known to many in the library 2.0 world through his Tame The Web blog and his participation at the Internet Librarian International (ILI) conferences.

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As the fall conference season gets into high gear, groups of librarians and information professionals will gather in conference centres and hotels all over the world to discuss issues and trends that offer challenges and opportunities for library services. Sadly, this year I can’t attend one of my favorite conferences: Internet Librarian International in London, England. Librarians from all over the world journey to London to exchange ideas, insights and, simply, talk.

I’ve attended ILI the past few years, serving on the advisory committee as well as presenting and teaching workshops, including on dedicated to blogging in 2005. I was happy to see Brian Kelly and Kara Jones are carrying that discussion forward with two sessions:

• Using Blogs Effectively Within Your Library and
• The Blogging Librarian: Avoiding Institutional Inertia

I look forward to reading blog coverage of their presentations.

Thinking about these presentations causes me to reflect on the history of the tool. In 2004, Merriam Webster online announced the most-searched word of the year was blog and noted that one of the most talked about online innovations of Web 2.0 was the use of blog software to create easily updated, content-rich Web sites.

The early definition the site provided offers insight into blogs’ genesis as a personal journaling tool:

Blog noun [short for Weblog] (1999) : a Web site that contains an online personal journal with reflections, comments and often hyperlinks provided by the writer.

From personal journaling onward, we can trace the evolution of blogging from “what I had for lunch” blogs to the adoption of the tool for businesses, organizations, and of course, librarians and libraries. In 2007, the thriving biblioblogosphere includes multiple library blogs as well as hundreds of individuals sharing their voices via personal, professionally focused blogs.

This summer, I completed my doctoral dissertation looking at those personal, professionally focused blogs. The research question centered around the motivations for librarians to write blogs. Based on the works of some library philosophers, I created and sought to prove my “Pragmatic Biblioblogger Model.” The model describes librarians who author a professionally focused blog beyond the scope of their job to find, share, and offer advice to others in the LIS profession. Constantly scanning via the tools of continuous computing, the pragmatic biblioblogger seeks to redesign library services in an era of enhanced technology. These librarians open comments and engage with other librarian bloggers to discuss and examine events, new technologies, and the LIS profession within a community they have created with a common goal: improving libraries.

I was pleased that my study yielded support for the model. As a participant, observer and examiner of the bibliobogosphere, I’ve seen a lot of changes, discourse and dissension - all of which add to the evolving nature of the medium within our profession.

When librarians blog for their institutions, it may seem that the mission is different, but it many ways it is most similar. Library weblogs, in all shapes and sizes from Ann Arbor District Library’s multiple blog presence to the smallest of the small “one person library” blog hosted at Blogger.com, sharing news and information is usually the number one goal. Pair this with what blogs do so well - enable conversation via commenting, librarians can now connect with their users online the way we have done across the desk for years.

These connections are playing out in some interesting ways in 2007: I’ve noticed the advent of administrator’s blogs, the extension of the blogging platform in some new and innovative ways, and the use of the tool as an educational vehicle for library staff to experience social software.

What was once the realm of the techie librarian in the basement of the library has moved to cadres of blogging librarians for individual libraries (such as my former library, the St. Joseph County Public Library in South Bend, Indiana, USA) on up to the actual involvement of administrators and directors. Look no further than Darien Library in Darien, Connecticut, USA for an example of a director’s blog.

There are definitely benefits to administrative blogging. It might be the library is about to launch a new initiative or fund raising campaign. The use of a blog as a communication mechanism to deliver transparent news and plans seems like a good fit. Properly marketed and utilized - key for an such project - the blog can be a visible means to connect users to library policy-makers. It would also set a good example for others in the library who may not want to participate. Top-down buy-in is so important for technology projects and organizational shifts to occur - and the voice of the director, shared openly and honestly, is a step in a good direction. Human discourse from the top might be very welcome in many libraries, internally and externally. Open comments would allow discussion. This also makes the library and staff visible on the Web.

Other library use blogs and more blog-like social tools as a clearinghouse of all manner of online content and links to multimedia offerings as well. Check out Allen County Public Library’s 2.0 clearinghouse to see this in action or take a look at Pierce County’s round up of their 2.0 tools with this post at Flickr.

Finally, no project has added more blogs to the Biblioblogosphere than Helene Blower’s Learning 2.0 course, used by libraries all over the world. As a means to acclimate staff to what blogs and other tools can do, there’s nothing better than actually doing it. Librarians and staff explore, play and report on their experiences via their blogs. Who knows how many may continue after the course is done - and how many may become vibrant voices within the Biblioblogosphere.

Are you curious? If you’re attending ILI be sure to check out the blog presentations - there’s still so much to discuss about this transformative tool. And please have a cup of tea for me as you enjoy the sessions, networking breaks and evening meals. ! If you’re reading from afar, explore on your own what’s happening online with blogs and other social tools. we truly are in the middle of an ongoing shift in libraries, where anyone can participate.

I am also very interested to hear what UK and other countries are doing with administrative blogs, 2.0 portals and Learning 2.0. Please share your comments here or email me.

Michael Stephens

The RSCs In Scotland NewsFeed Blog

Via a Technorati search for JISC I came across the RSC NewsFeed Blog provided by the JISC RSC Scotland North & East and RSC Scotland South & West services. This was launched on 28 August 2007 and since then then have been many postings, providing useful snippets of information, many of which describe various Web 2.0 services relevant to the teaching applications. 

I noticed that all of the posts were published on just three dates: 29 August, 11 September and 25 September.   I then realised that the blog is published as a newsletter, with issue 3 having been released recently.

I think this can be a useful approach to providing a blogging service, although I do wonder whether the sudden publication of multiple posts might act as a barrier to engaging readers in discussion via the blog comments (and the service does allow comments to be published).  But on the other hand, it does strike me as a more environmentally friendly solution that the printed newsletter and much more easier to use and repurposable than simply published a PDF version of a paper newsletter.

I’ve added this to my del.icio.us bookmarks of resources I’ll be using in the half day masterclass  on “Using Blogs Effectively Within Your Library” which Kara Jones and myself will be running on 7^th October 2007.

Does anyone else have example of blogs being used to provide access to newsletters?

Reminder of the UK Web Focus Evaluation

As announced on 23^rd August 2007, an evaluation of the UK Web Focus blog is currently being carried out, using the SurveyMonkey software.

The comments received so far have been very useful in helping me to gain a better understanding of the reader community and the infrastructure which is being used for reading this blog. I have also received useful feedback on the aspects of the blog which readers find useful - and areas in which improvements can be made.

The UK Web Focus has its first birthday on 1 November 2007. I am currently thinking about changes I could make which can enhance the service, so I would very much welcome feedback from readers who have not yet completed the (brief) evaluation.

The evaluation form will be live until 22^nd September.

Guest Blog Post: The Eternal Beta

Today’s guest blog post was written by Phil Wilson, who works in the Web Services Team at the University of Bath.  Phil ran a workshop session at the IWMW 2007 event on “The Eternal Beta - Can it Work in an Institution?” in which he addressed the question of whether the Web 2.0 development phhilisophy of ‘always beta’ was applicable with the educational sector:

Google’s famous for it, Flickr’s moved to Gamma, Moo are on an eternal 1.0 - yet still in institutions we plod on with a tired, slow-moving and opaque process for developing and enhancing applications. From our closed support lines to official notices on unread websites and applications mysteriously changing in front of a user’s very eyes we look staid and tedious. But it doesn’t have to be like that, we could be fast faced and interactive - but at what cost? Continuity? Uptime?

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I could ramble on about this for thousands of words, but I’ll try and keep it brief (for me):

• you take too long rolling out software
• you don’t do enough unit testing or user testing

One of the leading ideas of eternal beta is small improvements all the time. It’s the preferred model for developing Web 2.0 applications (just look at Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and about a billion Silicon Valley startups). The essence is that if you’ve changed something small and you’re waiting for the next milestone before you release, you’re crazy - just deliver it. If it turns out to be wrong or broken in some way, you can just change it again.

There are a couple of things people typically reply with:

One of the big fears that it hasn’t been user-tested enough. Well, in institutions we’ve got thousands of technically-minded members - staff and students alike; what do you think the odds are on being able to make, say, twenty of them beta testers? (It’s critical to get testers from outside your team; your team are effectively the alpha testers) I mean, you’ve probably got bloggers, Facebook group founders and tech contacts everywhere. See who you can find to test your apps - it doesn’t have to be the same people for all of them, and make it worth their while either by delivering a better application to them than everyone else, or maybe some mark of kudos inside the application that everyone else can see.

This does rely on being able to get good feedback from your testers - hey, you’d hope that if your software is good enough they’ll be telling you anyway, but you can use incentives or whatever floats their feedback-giving boat. The important part is exposing the feedback communication channel; maybe it’s a forum, maybe it’s blog where you post the new features and they add comments, maybe it’s a weekly meetup in the bar. Whatever you do, talking to those people and making sure that they can see that there are other active testers, whom you’re listening to and actually replying to is A1 critical. No trust == no good feedback.

The other big fear is that this basically throws traditional software development and delivery out of the window (farewell, cruel Gantt chart). When a team suddenly has deliverable dates measured in the days rather than the months you suddenly discover that the priorities change and you start getting people-focussed software rather than something focussed on year-old requirements. This is where agile techniques start kicking in. Things like pair-programming, continuous integration, automated deployment are all your friends. Techniques like PRINCE2 and Scrum are there to pick up the rest of the slack.

In the real world, although my team isn’t quite there yet (notably with the feedback), we’re trying hard and it’s paying dividends in terms of delivered software and happier users.

Phil Wilson
Web Services
University of Bath

Phil’s blog: http://philwilson.org/blog/

Guest Blog Post: Web 2.0 and Sustainability

Today’s guest blog post comes from Ross Gardler, manager of JISC’s OSS Watch service and a co-faciliator of a workshop session at IWMW 2007 on “Sustainable Services: Solidity based on Openness?”.

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At OSS Watch we spend a considerable amount of time highlighting sustainability as one of the key benefits of open source. There is no central organisation that can simply “pull the plug” on the product and its maintenance. Open source licences ensure that the software will always be available and, while there are active users of that software, it will always be maintained.This perpetual availability of open sourced software is only one of the key benefits provided by open source licences. Another is the ability to take that software and customise it for your own needs. To add new features and to disable features not important to your situation. In other words to take a “close fit” solution and mould it into a “better fit” solution.Web services that provide open Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) present similar mix-and-match benefits, at least on the surface, that open source provides, but does it provide the same level sustainability in your solutions?This was the topic of a workshop session I hosted with Andrew Savory at the Institutional Web Management Workshop 2007 entitled “Sustainable Services: Solidity based on Openness?“.  In this session we asked how participants measured the sustainability of their chosen software solutions. The list of criteria produced included items such as:

• reliability
• reputation
• scale of the provider
• significance of us as a customer
• data ownership and openness
• fashion
• community
• flexibility

The full list was far too long to detail in this post, but a few were clearly more important than others. This became particularly evident when we proceeded to evaluate a number of well known Web services against the defined criteria.

For example, data access was critical in most Web services. Was the data available in an open standard that made it interoperable with other services? Having put data into the service, could you get it out again? Flexibility was another major concern for the API approach. Did the API allow us to achieve what we want to achieve?

I would argue, like Mark Pilgrim, that this should not be an issue, we should have access to our data, and all derived data, as a matter of course - it’s our data after all. Mark observes that “praising companies for providing APIs to get your own data out is like praising auto companies for not filling your airbags with gravel.“

Workshop participants also noted that there is no guarantee that a service will be provided in the future. A topic that Brian Kelly discussed here in this blog when Splashblog closed its doors. Brian suggested that such closures could be considered by some to be a clear justification for not making use of such external Web 2.0 services - a point made by a number of our session participants. Indeed, many services were marked down quite heavily since they are largely unproven beta services with no clear business model. Despite this healthy concern over the longevity of service offerings, workshop attendees felt that some services, such as Shibboleth, are more sustainable because they have public money behind them. However, as Brian goes on to observe, even public sector services are not guaranteed to be there forever. To support his point Brian cites a BBC news article describing the closure of 551 government Web sites and wonders what happens to data held by the AHDS when funding ceases.

The overall conclusion of our workshop attendees was that Web services should only be relied upon for non-critical functions in your institution. Over time we may become more comfortable with relying on third party services, but for now we need to be careful. I liken it to the development of voice communications technologies. We don’t worry about having a dial tone the next time we pick up the phone, but the recent Skype outage shows we can’t rely on the newer voice communications services. The result is that Skype is not suitable for emergency calls.

Reaching Sustainability Through Openness

In my opinion one way of moving towards more sustainable services at a sensible pace is through openness in the development of those services. That is, if a service uses open data standards, provides fully open access to all its data and its APIs and encourages users to participate in the ongoing development of the service, I, as a user, am more likely to stick with it past my initial, experimental, use. For example, I love the idea of Dopplr, but I haven’t gone past exploration because it fails to provide the data in format that is useful to my objectives (Editor’s Note: Phil Wilson pointed out that a Doppler API has recently been annouded at http://dopplr.pbwiki.com/. This comment was added at the request of  Ross Gardler on 6 Septmeber 2007). Conversely, just 10 hours after the announcement of a beta API for OhLoh I had integrated OhLoh data into Simal, the OSS Watch project cataloguing tool. As soon as OhLoh produces an API for submitting data I’ll ensure the flow is two way, making both projects more likely to survive.

However, openness should not stop at the data and the APIs. I need to ensure that the service remains aligned with my strategic objectives. I want to be able to contribute directly to the flexibility and sustainability of the service in ways that suit my needs. This is where Oh Loh falls down, it is not open source and so my contribution options are limited.

Open source enables us, as users, to choose how to invest our resources in sustainable solutions. We can purchase related products such as support and hosting, or we can fund strategic development, or we can ensure our own staff help support and sustain the product through direct contribution of use cases, documentation, feature requests, bug fixes and even new feature implementations. All of these actions help ensure the product survives and continues to be available to our own organisation.

Web service companies will gladly accept similar contributions from us. The big difference between the two approaches is that with open source we have the freedom to decide where our resources are invested. We can maximise the impact our investment has on our individual utilisation of the service, thus making the service more useful. We are even free to take the software and create our own version should our objectives diverge considerably from the originating service provider (although this can usually be avoided if the project is well managed and cultivates a healthy community).

Most of us want the convenience of a service provider, but such convenience comes with the risk of potential lock-in and, even worse, the loss of a critical service. Having access to the source code means that we increase competition and consequently increase innovation in the code base. It does not prevent companies from differentiating themselves through the provision a more reliable and usable service within their chosen market niche.

Given the choice, I will always use a Web service that makes its source code available under an open source licence, even if that service is less developed than closed competitors. In most cases I will still purchase the service from a provider, but I want to keep my options open in order to ensure my own offerings are sustainable.

Our workshop participants largely agreed with this view, they too were more concerned about having control over their own organisations future in the long term than they were about the short term gains of adopting closed service models.

Ross Gardler
OSS Watch
OUCS
13 Banbury Road
University of Oxford
Oxford
OX2 6NN

OSS Watch Web site: http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/
OSS Watch blog: http://involve.jisc.ac.uk/wpmu/oss-watch/

Guest Blog Post: The Web Community Discussion Group Session at IWMW 2007

Today’s guest blog post was written by Debbie Nicholson, of the Web Support Unit at the University of Essex.

Debbie writes about the Institutional Web Management Workshop and the discussion group session she attended on “The Web Community” and the implications for the Web community.

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I didn’t sign up for this discussion group … I signed up for one of the Greener Web discussion groups. I got a bit seduced by the idea of the whole Web community though. Having written my workshop session extolling the virtues of social networking and facilitating community of practice, it seemed wrong to suddenly change sides and start rooting for the environment … Also, Mike McConnell was chairing the session and he offered me beer if I would take notes for him … fair exchange, or so I thought!

From past experience, the discussion groups can be either really good or really bad. This year was no exception. I know of a few people who didn’t go back to their second discussion group session as they just didn’t think it was worth it. I know of one group where the chair turned up, said he wasn’t sure what they were supposed to be talking about, but that he wouldn’t be there the second day anyway… I think we actually had more people at our second session than the first. Word had obviously travelled that we were having a good discussion and really trying to come up with some answers … either that or someone had heard Mike mention beer.

We went into our session and did the usual … little eye contact, talk to no one. I suggested moving the chairs from classroom style rows, into a more discussion friendly circle-ish shape … and all of a sudden people started smiling and talking, and making eye contact! Mike soon put a stop to that with the regulation and totally hateful ‘5 minutes to introduce yourselves to someone you don’t know’. Now this one is a little tricky… I’ve been going to IWMW for 6 years now. There are lots of people I don’t *really* know, but so many people I’ve seen around. So many names I’ve seen on documents and mailing lists, but like I say, I don’t really know them … but I almost feel as though I do.

Once we started the discussion it quickly transpired that we had quite a bit to say on the subject … 11 pages of notes in fact. And that only included the stuff that I was quick enough to write down. I also discovered that it’s actually quite difficult to be part of the discussion and write the notes. I wanted to jump in so many times, however, by the time I’d written up what was being said, someone else had got in first - and I had to write up their comments (repeat as necessary)!

After the conference I got the train back to London with Mike, his parting words were “thanks for writing the notes babe, just erm, type hem up and post them to me”. I sat at my desk about a week later looking at 11 pages of scrawl … Note to self: this just has to be easier if you do it straight away. Meaningless lines joining up one half a sentence with a whole load of words I couldn’t read, and some I clearly couldn’t spell… Only one thing for it… put the coffee on! I’m such a bugger for vacuuming the cat when there’s a rubbish job to be done.

Some time later, the notes started to emerge. What was really lovely about doing this job, apart from finishing it obviously, was the enthusiasm of the session really came back to me. The fact that we actually came up with action points. Things that we wanted to achieve … nothing that could be classed as rocket science, just practical things hat we want to put in place to take the ‘Web Management Community’ from being an idea, to a reality. Maintain the Facebook for IWMW, either year by year or a general IWMW group that we can all subscribe to. Try to encourage as many people as possible to sign up and become a part of it, and to think how we can make it bigger (can we incorporate any of the ideas from the Innovation competition…?). Like I said, not rocket science, but at least doable, something we can put our hands on … unlike the beer I was promised!!!

The mailing lists serve a purpose, they’ve worked well for many years to provide information, solutions, a point of contact … can we really call that a community though? When we go to the conference, we are only ever one drink in the bar away from making a fab new contact or a bloody good friend. With Facebook (or something similar) we can put a face to all the names we’ve seen around, or indeed a name to the face (how many people do we see year in year out and just can’t remember what they are called…?), we can post a comment, or make contact with someone we’ve wanted to speak to but don’t feel we know them well enough, we can invite people to gigs that are half way across the country … they might not be able to go - but god it’s nice to be asked (thanks Claire) … In short, we can create a community.

IWMW was the reason I joined Facebook. I wanted to know who else was going to the conference, all the details and any gossip … It’s turned into so much more than that for me though, and clearly that is the case for others too. People are using it, posting work related questions, joining groups that will provide us with more information and more contacts. I’ve managed to get back in touch with people I haven’t spoken to in years, made some really useful contacts, and made some lovely new friends too.

It’s scary to contact someone you don’t know for advice - how much easier is it to just get in touch and say “Thanks for  turning me into a vampire, by the way, do you know anything about…?“

Discussion notes are available on the IWMW 2007 wiki at http://iwmw2007.wetpaint.com/page/Discussion_F

Debbie Nicholson
Web Support Unit
University of Essex

Debbie’s contact details are also available on Facebook.

Guest Post: Post Your Favourite IWMW 2007 Video Moments

The regular guest blog post this month features a number of articles about the Institutional Web Management Workshop 2007 (IWMW 2007) held at the University of York on 16-18^th July 2007.

In this month’s opening guest blog post Anthony Leonard, who coordinated the live streaming of the plenary talks at IWMW 2007, shares his favourite moments and invites readers of the blog to suggest their preferences.

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Brian has kindly asked me to write about our experiences in streaming the recent IWMW 2007 plenary talks. What I’d like to do is to ask readers of this blog what they considered their favourite moments from what was, as usual, a great event. Anyone can create a link to a specific point in the streams simply by clicking the “Link To Now” button during playback. Once clicked, a new browser window opens a special URL which starts playing the stream at the point you specified. Simply cut and paste this URL into a comment on this post, or anywhere else you feel like for that matter. (Neat huh? Now there’s something you can’t do on Google Video, yet!).  For the record, here are my top three favourites:

1. Satisficing
2. PLEs digested
3. Caught on camera

I’ve focused on the lighter side to get things going, but you might want to highlight something that made you think, learn, worry or recoil as much as smile or laugh - anything really that stuck in your mind and is worth a second look.

So go on, if you’d like to, why not find your favourite moments from the IWMW 2007 videos, click on the “Link to Now” button and post the URLs back as comments to this blog post.

Technorati Tags: IWMW2007

Blogging Masterclass at ILI 2007

Last month I mentioned that Kara Jones and myself will be running a blogging masterclass, the day before the start of the ILI 2007 conference.

We are about to finalise the materials for the workshop. We would  like to include various examples of uses of blogs within the library sector, including academic libraries, public libraries and national libraries. We would particularly welcome examples of the various ways in which blogs are being used, descriptions of any barriers you might have experienced (or may be experiencing) in setting up blogs and ways in which you may have addressed such barriers and approaches you have taken to ensuring your blog is sustainable.

Many thanks to Tom Roper for giving his  thoughts when I initially mentioned this masterclass.

And thanks to my co-facilitator, Kara Jones, for agreeing to provide a video  clip about the workshop session.  This video is is available as a sidebar widget on this blog’s home page, using the Vod:Pod service and the Vod:Pod widget.

Technorati Tags: ILI2007

An Embarrassing Image Bot

An approach I’ve taken to maximising the impact of this blog has been register it (and its RSS feed) in various locations. One of these was the MyBlogLog service, as I’ve described previously.

As well as providing access to the blog by visitors to the MyBlogLog service (and I notice there have been 600 visitors in the last seven days) this service also allows you to embed a widget in your sidebar, showing an image of recent readers (who obviously need to register with the service and provide an image).

I have also felt that this can provide a useful way of getting to know your readers; it allows allows readers to see who else has recently been reading the blog.

MyBlogLog subscribers can chose for themselves the image they wish to upload. In many social networking services we are finding that people upload caricatures of themselves, or an image which may reflect their interests (such as, as shown in the accompanying image, a cat).

Last week, however, I noticed that the image for one reader showed a pair of buttocks. And this image appeared to stay for about a week. As the person’s own blog is called “Becoming A Pick-Up Artist” I decided that it was unlikely that this was a reader who had a legitimate interest in my blog, but is actually an interesting example of link spam (someone who seeks to increase traffic to their blog by providing links in other blogs, often via blog comments).

Today I noticed that the image had been changed - it is now a portrait photograph of a man wearing a wig and a mask over his eyes.

This image isn’t as embarrassing (or offensive to some) as the previous one, but it still is spam, I feel. So I have emailed MyBlogLog to inform them of this.

More interestingly, though, are the implications of allowing images to be included in a blog without any form of moderation. Would the example I’ve described cause problems if used in the context of a school? And what if, for example, a groups of users had an image which included a poster giving the first letter of their name - and, first, Frank, followed by Ursula, followed by Connie and Kay read my blog. Nothing wrong with the individual images, but put together in a particular order …

My take on this is that I will observe the patterns of usage, and ensure that I can remove such widgets if they display content which is illegal or causes real offence. However as someone who needs to be able to identify such issues and to advice others I will continue to make use of such services.

Of course the image could only be seen by people who came to the UK Web Focus blog side and looked at the sidebar. Now that I’ve included an image in this post, it will be seen by readers who use a blog aggregator or an RSS reader. I hope the image isn’t considered offensive to anybody!

Comment Spam On This Blog

This blog has now received more spam comments than blog views, with the Akismet spam filter having blogged 33,946 spam comments since the blog was launched on 1^st November 2006. The blog Web site has been viewed 33,809 time with today, I believe, being the first time that the number of spam comments has exceeded the number of page views.

It is clear to me that managing this blog would be much more difficult without the Akismet spam filter, which is included as part of the standard WordPress.com hosted solution.

In the early days of this blog I would check the Akismet incoming spam comments to ensure that no legitimate comments had been incorrectly filtered (and this did happen on a number of occasions). However this became increasingly time-consuming, so I no longer do this, allowing Akismet to delete comments it has identified as spam (with an example of the spam I received shown at the bottom of this post).

It would be possible for me to disable comments to my posts or to require registration, but I feel this would act as a barrier to people who may have valuable comments to make. So I will continue my current policy of relying on Akismet. What I would do if WordPress stopping providing this service free-of-charge is another question, though.

Guest Post: A Sense of Community

A regular guest blog post at the start of every month aims to provide an fresh insight into issues which are covered in the UK Web Focus blog.

The month’s guest blog post comes from Kara Jones, Research Publications Librarian at the University of Bath. Kara explores the idea of ‘a sense of community’.

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Futurelab made the observation, in a report last year that learning is moving towards the three Cs - community, collaboration and communication. These are concepts that go further than just learning - particularly building communities, which has become central to our professional interactions online with blogs, wikis and social networks keeping us up to date and involved in conversations with peers. In light of this, I see two important issues: (1) how to build a community and (2) how to find and join a community. Let’s take a look at these two sides.

Building a Community

How does a community evolve? They develop for many reasons - to share research thoughts, to work collaboratively, or to create social networks. How each of these communities grows can depend on the intention of its developers. Here are a few examples:

The Serendipitous Community

Craig Laughton’s Gooseania is a maths blog that grew into a community sharing experiences of undertaking a PhD. This community developed organically as Craig used his blog as a reflective journal to chronicle his studies, and apparently found himself answering questions and engaging in conversations with others undergoing the same process.

Communities of Interest

Developing a community around a subject or topic, such as this blog from Brian takes a concerted effort, and there’s been some discussion (and will be more discussion at a session to be held at the Internet Librarian International (ILI) 2007 conference on the struggles building a blog community, and measuring success and return on investment.

The Extension Community

Other times a physical group of people will create an online community to broaden their communication efforts. Take for example, the team at SHERPA who are developing a community of institutional repository managers. This is a concerted effort to pull a formal group together for the purposes of sharing experiences, and to add weight to statements with a collective voice. They are in the process of developing a wiki for members to add their details in a central location to share with others.

The Socially Networked Community

Often like the extension community, but also including online only contacts, this type includes not just Facebook or Myspace, but social networking sites such as Academici (for finding researchers with similar interests), Ning (with the Library 2.0 network of clued-in librarians) and most recently Nature Networks for scientists.

Find