virtually a librarian

This post started out as a comment on Kathryn Greenhill’s latest post, Like a Virgin? If you haven’t read it, you should. In it, Kathryn talks about the concept of ‘fast’ - in a recent post, David Lee King identifies a number of services that are direct competitors for libraries, and Kathryn astutely points out that the defining characteristic of these competitors, and the characteristic that makes them such strong competitors for libraries, is that they get the idea of ‘fast’. Customers want what they want, right now, and the competitors that David Lee King lists get that.

I think what our customers want often goes beyond fast, into the realms of immediate. As the hyperconnected generations become independent library users (ie users in their own right, rather than kids brought along to libraries by their parents), they’re going to want immediacy, because they’re used to it in every aspect of their lives. I think that’s going to extend to the physical items we hold, too. If they have to go on a long hold list to get a popular book, as David Lee King suggests in his post on competitors, are they going to be willing to wait? Will they actually care about format at all, if they can get something in one format faster than in another?

Something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is agility. My greatest concern for the future of libraries is that I’m not sure we’re positioned as an industry (or as individual organisations, in some [many?] cases) to be agile in meeting the challenges that face us and the opportunities that await us. We’ve been playing catch up for too long. We need to take some giant leaps. This goes hand in hand with Kathryn’s notion of fast: we need to be able to act fast when opportunities or challenges arrive. We often just can’t do that.

So how can we address this? We need to kit our staff out with the skills they need to drive web based services and non-traditional service delivery and collecting models. We need to build the infrastructure required to sustain robust online services. We need lightweight policy frameworks that allow wriggle room. We need leaders that value innovation. Without all of this, we’ll never have any hope of being agile.

Kathryn also talks about marketing our strengths to ensure our future. I agree, we need to sell ourselves, to our funding bodies and to our customers. Public libraries, for example, already have some of what our customers are looking for: downloadable media, fast and free wifi, latest release dvds… but how many people in our communities actually know all of this? Do our funders even know what a rock-star job we do on some of this stuff?

For me, the keys to ensuring the future of libraries are agility, good marketing, and the ability to immediately satisfy customer needs. Becoming an agile industry is perhaps not an easy task, but it’s certainly something we can aspire to. When it comes to marketing - well, that’s not easy either, but how many libraries exist within larger organisations that have their own marketing departments, and how many of us make use of them? How many of us willing talk ourselves up, both as individuals and as organisations, by going after media, speaking at conferences, writing articles? Perhaps the hardest thing of all is going to be the immediacy issue: with limited funding, how can we satisfy our customers’ desire for immediacy? It’s not always feasible to buy more books, and how else do you meet demand? But even here, there are things we can do: think outside the square, like mpow has, and put in place programs designed to ensure the latest and hottest titles are on the shelves. Or run customer programs that teach people about how great eBooks are, so demand increases for this lower-priced format.

So, be agile, talk yourself up, and give your customers what they want, right now, then the future of the library is guaranteed. Piece of cake, right?!

Courtesy of Kathryn (thanks!), it seems it’s my turn to do the seven things thang, cause I know you’re all totally keen to find out ten things you didn’t know about me. This is actually quite hard, because I still have a circle of friends from school and my pre-library working days, plus I’m a blabbermouth who’ll tell anyone just about anything, so some of this might not be all that new to a number of people. Anyhoo, here goes:

1. I have a secret (or not so secret, if you’ve been in my car) penchant for what I like to call nst nst music: big, bassy, electronic tunes of the slightly poppy variety. And I like to play it really, really loud. It’s my rev up tool and I have a concert in the car every morning on the way to work.
2. I have been known to go away to a conference with more pairs of shoes than days away (like five pairs for three days, because it is of course imperative that you change shoes before dinner). (See 7)
3. Sleep is a very high priority for me, and it is not uncommon for me to pull a twelve hour sleep on a weekend. On school nights, I MUST have eight hours or I am totally non-functional at work the next day.
4. I think reality tv is the bomb. So you think you can dance, Big Brother, Idol, America’s next top model, Biggest loser… I love them all. I have been known to go to several Big Brother evictions a season, and I was devastated when they cancelled it. I pretend I like this stuff because I’m all intellectual and I like to see the playing out of social roles and issues etc on screen in an artificial environment, but really, I just find it endlessly entertaining.
5. Still on reality tv: Antiques roadshow. Need I say more? Yes, maybe I should: sometimes (not always, I’m not that strange) I tape Antiques roadshow to watch later, because it’s not on at a time friendly to people who work.
6. I am, in general, a shopper, and if I had an addiction (besides my Coca Cola addiction, which I seem to have pretty much broken, and my tv addiction, which I think is totally legitimate), it would be shopping. My particular poisons? Shoes, perfume, books, shoes and oh! Did I mention shoes? Not even sensible shoes. Oh no. I like to buy shoes that will only go with one outfit, because they are bright orange, or yellow, or electric blue. But that’s okay, because I’m always well coordinated (I hope).
7. I like to make my own jewellery. It’s my only ‘hobby’ that doesn’t involve technology. I have so many earrings I could open my own shop. In fact, I once bought so many beads in one spree that the shop assistant offered to label everything with prices to help me when it came time to sell what I made. Ha ha! Silly lady - it’s always all for me!

I’m tagging:

• Andrew
• Peta
• and giving up at two!

So for Christmas, I scored a Sony PRS-505 Portable Reader System (aka a shiny eBook reader). I’m increasingly interested in eBooks for both personal and professional reasons. As an Electronic Services Librarian, I’m always thinking about digital formats and one of the most interesting parts of my job is looking after our eBook collection. Personally, I really want to stop accumulating so many print books - I’d rather accumulate ’special books’ (ie coffee table books and fiction and non fiction prose that I’ve read and enjoyed). They take up so much room and they are such a pain when moving house!

Anyway, I thought I’d jot down a few things here based on having read a couple of books on my reader now. I am, in a nutshell, exceedingly happy with it. So happy with it that I want to start with the few negatives, so I can finish here on a positive note:

• First and foremost, as someone who would always choose Mac over PC (but who has access to both), I am disappointed that I can’t use the supplied software on my computer of choice. I’m also disappointed that the process (a workaround) for transferring purchased DRMed Adobe content to my reader via my Mac is so clunky. And most of all, I’m peeved that I cannot transfer Adobe DRMed content borrowed from my library to my reader using my MacBook - there isn’t even a laborious workaround (that I can find), because there are additional files that need to be passed to the player, which on a PC, is handled by Adobe Digital Editions (ADE). Because Sony do not support Mac, neither does Adobe, hence ADE for Mac does not do the job. But I knew this before I bought the device, so I can’t complain too much.
• Adobe PDF eBooks don’t display quite as well as I’d like on the reader (or at least, the ten or so I’ve looked at don’t seem to). I have good eye sight, but even I can’t read the teeny tiny text without zooming in, and when I do, I end up with between one and five ‘orphan’ (can I call it orphan if it’s more than one?) lines of text on a second page. You’re already turning the page more frequently with an eBook reader, because you don’t get the two page spread. To add an additional page turn is a bit annoying. For the first 30 or so pages (which doubled to 60 pages because of this annoying formatting problem) of the first book I read, I was really peeved. It took me about that long to work out timing for page turns - ie you don’t have to read to the very last word before pressing the page turn button, because it takes a moment to render, allowing you to scan the last words - but then I got into a rhythm, and so this quirk began to bother me less. Still, I wish we could get to a point where there was a standard format for eBooks. It would make the reading experience much more seamless.
• The fact that I can’t buy from the Sony eBook store is really, really annoying. Despite the awful exchange rate, the prices of eBooks at the Sony eBook store are reasonable (though, I really think eBook prices in general could come down a bit, compared to prices for print books - but that’s another issue). But I can’t take advantage of that, because the store is only available for use by customers in the US and Canada (you can’t buy the PRS-505 in Australia either, or rather, Sony doesn’t sell it here. You can find it on eBay, of course, and I got mine from B&H Photo, who I would not hesitate to buy from again). Apparently, I can use the store if I get a gift certificate. I just have to figure out how to get a gift certificate! I didn’t have any problems claiming my 100 free classic books from the Sony store, though.
• I knew that you couldn’t read these things in the dark without a book light, but I was still a wee bit disappointed at readability in low light. I like to read in bed, and with my bedside lamp on, some angles are a bit tricky.

And on the upside:

• Readability in bright light is excellent. My laptop screen is all but unreadable in direct sunlight; the PRS-505 performs very well.
• The device comes with a neat cover that happens to be the exact same colour as my current favourite handbag. Way to go!
• The screen is easy to look at - my eyes don’t get tired the way they do looking at a computer screen.
• The device is pretty comfortable in my hands. I would make one ergonomic suggestion, and that would be to position the page turn keys that are on the left bottom side of the device closer to the middle, so that they fit under your left thumb better. Actually, make that two suggestions: the right hand page turn buttons are a little high for my hand - it would be slightly more comfortable for me if they were a fraction lower, but then, I guess guys use this device too, and lower wouldn’t work for them.
• Minus charging time, from unpacking the shipping box to reading a book took me about ten minutes. That includes installing software and working out how to get a library book onto the device with Digital Editions. I did not need to use any of my techie skills, but I did need my techie / library knowledge to know that I can get library eBooks onto the gadget with Digital Editions (and that this can be done on a PC but not a Mac). If you were going to rely predominantly on getting books from the Sony store, you could use this gadget with some pretty basic computer skills. And really, transferring library books with ADE is dead easy too - you just need to know that it’s possible. I guess that’s more a marketing issue for libraries than a usability issue for PRS-505 owners. My decidedly low-tech mum is interested in getting one, and I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it to her.
• Battery life is impressive. I’ve read two novels (albeit young adult novels, so perhaps not the longest I’ll ever read) and about 60 pages of a third, and the battery has only just dropped a bar. I’ve also done a stack of show and tell spruiking about my new toy - generally showing off all the neat features and flicking through books - and yet the battery has held up incredibly well. I’ve read a couple of hours a day, every day, for a week, and I’ve got three out of four bars left on the battery. I don’t know about you, but I seem to have to charge my iPod an awful lot, so I wasn’t expecting fabulous battery life out of this gadget, given that I use it for a comparable period each day. I’m impressed, and surprised.
• The device is very light and adds negligible weight to my handbag. The result is I’ve always got something to read. I’m of the kind who chucks a book in their bag when they walk out the door, just in case there’s a minute to spare. It’s especially great when you’re near the end of a good book to know you’ve got a backup in your bag, without having to add the weight of a second print book.
• I haven’t travelled with this thing yet, but I can only imagine it’s going to be great. My bag is always overweight - I don’t travel light as a general rule, and I always like to have my current fiction and nonfiction reads with me, as well as an extra fiction read for ‘just in case’. Now I’ll pack one slim device instead of three books. The one thing I suspect will be annoying is that I’m sure you’re meant to turn your eBook reader off along with all other electronic devices for take off and landing… Maybe I’ll have to read the in-flight magazine?

What I’ve learnt from my experience with my new toy thus far:

• I can’t see myself reading an eBook on a screen any smaller than the PRS-505 screen - you won’t see me reading eBooks on my mobile phone just yet. My feeling is yet more page turns might start to get on my nerves. I also find the PRS screen infinitely easier to look at than a computer or phone screen.
• Having an easy and convenient way to read eBooks is not going to be good for my budget. When you’re reading a series, it’s all too easy to jump online and buy the next book, when you’d usually just borrow it from the library. This is especially true when the library has the first two books in the series as eBooks, but not the third, and you simply CANNOT wait to get the print book. Impulse shoppers beware.
• As far as I can tell, if publishers get on the eBook bandwagon, if the industry comes to an agreement about a standard format, and if some smart marketing of portable reading devices (dedicated eBook readers or otherwise) is embarked upon, then the eBook will not be the end of publishing, as some naysayers have predicted. It could, rather, re-energise the industry.

So, in a nutshell, I love my new toy. I’m all for multifunction devices, but I really am not bothered by carrying this extra device. I understand the appeal of being able to read a book on, say, your iPhone, but I’m not bothered by the extra gadget in my bag and I really think the reading experience is far better on the Sony than it is on touch screen phones, at this point. There’s certainly a big enough difference in quality of experience to warrant carrying an extra device (but then, in my handbag at any given moment you’ll find a three metre data cable, a wireless presentation remote, a couple of thumb drives, two mobile phones, and very often, a sub notebook, so perhaps I’m not the best example…). It was a pricey acquisition (I really wish I’d bought it a couple of months ago, when I was thinking about it, before the bottom dropped out of the Australian dollar) but I do think I’ll get a significant amount of use out of it.

To finish on a funny note, go check out the Unshelved strip written especially for all those library customers who got an eBook reader for Christmas. Tee hee! There’s a lesson in it, as well as a laugh. When these things eventually do sell in Australia, and they pick up some traction in the market, I’ll be looking at running classes on using them, just like we do for customers with computer training and our “Get the most out of your MP3 player” classes. We might think they’re dead simple to use, and they might actually be that, but there’s a lot to be said for helping people develop confidence with gadgets.

I said I’d do it. No one believed me. But the day has come, and I am one stubborn gal.

My seven-day-long interwebs free period begins in three hours.

I may resort to getting someone to hide my laptops, but the aim is to resist temptation, while temptation is in full site.

Wishing all a fabulously festive week ahead. See you on the flip-side (when I’ll either be highly strung and in desperate need of some net time, or totally chilled and ready to relinquish my gadgets).

danah boyd explains the rationale behind her forthcoming month-long email sabbatical. How refreshing to come back from holidays and not have to spend the first days/weeks catching up on email. If I was dealing with 500-700 personally addressed emails a day, I think I’d be doing the same (and I thought my current onslaught was overwhelming!).

Those of you who know me know I’m a chronic email checker / Twitterer / Facebooker / blog reader / yadda yadda… I own two laptops because my preferred laptop (a MacBook) is too big to throw in my handbag, have a mobile wireless connection for backup and have been known to check webmail on my mobile when my morning coffee stop is taking too long.

It’s nothing compared to a month of rejecting emails, but I’m aiming for a totally interwebs free week starting Christmas day. My phone will only be used for proper phone tasks - no surreptitious checking of anything - and my laptops will be gathering dust. It’s sad, but true, that I cannot remember a single day in the last five years where I haven’t been connected to the interwebs. No, wait. I think having my wisdom teeth out might have meant a web free day. But only one.

So, a disconnected week? Hmmm… It will be a challenge, but one that I’m looking forward to.

This weekend, I’m working on the bordering-on-mythological paper on mpow’s blog pilot. To that end, I’ve been trawling the interwebs looking for blog posts, articles… anything documenting libraries’ and the corporate world’s strategies for evaluating the success or otherwise of blogging projects. I’ve been trawling for a while, but I live in hope that it’s just my search skills letting me down, and I’m going to miraculously find the very article I need at the eleventh hour.

As I’ve lamented earlier, libraries are not publicly documenting their evaluations of blogging projects, which is a problem because it makes benchmarking near impossible. Sure, you can still come up with a bunch of metrics and work out a number for each, but how do you know if the number you’re getting it good or bad?

Luckily, through a serendipitous Twitter experience, I’ve managed to track down a couple of people who were willing to share their data. But I need more. More, I say!

Enter Walt Crawford’s Public Library Blogs: 252 Examples. I have to confess, I’ve been meaning to buy and read this book for ages. I finally did buy and read it today, and I wish I’d read it a while back. If you’re responsible for a blogging project, you need to read this study. Especially useful is the grouping of the examples by population served - this allows you to compare your library’s blog’s performance for key metrics against like-sized libraries. I think it’s also a useful tool in setting realistic expectations, especially when it comes to converstatinal intensity (or the number of comments libraries tend to get per post). I wish I’d bought this and shared it with our staff ahead of the pilot.

While Crawford didn’t have access to usage stats, this is still an incredibly useful book.

I do wish, though, that someone would go begging to the library community at large to supply site visits, page views, links clicked and a few other metrics besides, so that we could have a ginormous study alla Walt Crawford’s that includes the kind of statistics he unfortunately didn’t have access to. PhD thesis, anyone? Even to do it for a grouping of libraries (say, public libraries serving populations between 400,000 and 500,000 - obviously, my reasons are entirely altruistic) would be incredibly useful, and you could extrapolate for libraries of different sizes.

As an aside, I love that I can buy a book online and be reading it within two minutes. I wonder if publishers will ever sort out the DRM debate and get pricing right on eBooks so we can do this with anything we might want to read.

Right, enough procrastinating.

“I can tell.”

The Night Ferry by Michael Robotham.

Rules:

• Get the book nearest to you. Right now.
• Go to page 56.
• Find the 5th sentence.
• Write this sentence - either here or on your blog.
• Copy these instructions as commentary of your sentence.
• Don’t look for your favorite book or your coolest but really the nearest.

So I spent the last couple of days in Melbourne at NLS4. The New Librarians Symposium is a great biennial for new graduates to get together, present a first paper, hear from experts and have some seriously good times do some serious networking.

It was a chock-full program: 30 papers, 5 keynotes, a debate and a handful of other talks in two days. It was exhausting, and for the first time ever, I actually left the conference early and took an earlier flight home. The tiredness might have been made worse by the social program - which included a pre-conference drinks meet up (which a few of us followed up by a late, late, late dinner that kept us all awake half the night), a cocktail party and the conference dinner (which I skipped this time round) - and the fact that I managed to have a hotel room situated right on top of one of Melbourne’s most popular (and loudest) nightclubs. The music was great; it’s just that I didn’t particularly want to feel it vibrating through the floor and all the furniture at 2am after a long day of papers! Next time I book accommodation at the conference venue, I’ll be looking for reviews first.

Highlights of the conference for me:

• Donna Leung’s paper on transferable skills and using them to help you switch sectors, Any old library job versus the job your really want. I actually put my laptop down and just listened for this paper - something fairly rare! People talked about this paper for the rest of the conference.
• Alyson Dalby’s paper on being professionally active. I like that Alyson subtly highlighted the difference between being an active association / group / committee member and an inactive member. I think this was a timely lead in to the call for expressions of interest for the ALIA New Generation Advisory Committee (go! express your interest!), of which Alyson and I are both members. People always come away from conferences re energised; I hope some come away energised to get active.
• Naomi Doessel’s paper on professional development for librarians working in non-traditional library roles. Lots of notes were taken in this session. For me, the most interesting part was Naomi’s run-down of the different mentoring relationships that she makes use of. And the Ian images were highly amusing too.
• Bruce Klopsteins’ paper Butting heads or building minds, in which he pulled together a bunch of ideas from his reading and presented a paper that felt more like a keynote than a first time paper. Some really intelligent thought went into this one. I’m looking forward to reading the full paper.

Some non program highlights included dinner at a fabulous Italian restaurant on Thursday night, followed by dinner at my favourite Melbourne restaurant Cafe Zum Zum on Friday. Also a highlight was catching up with friends from afar - friends from uni, colleagues from my former pow, the people I get to see only on the conference circuit, and a whole bunch of new people.

The New Generation Advisory Committee (NGAC) is currently reviewing the future of the New Librarians Symposium and looking for feedback. If this is a topic close to your heart, check out the article in this month’s inCite, which outlines the four models we’ve come up with, then drop us an email with your feedback.

As for me, I think this will probably be my last NLS. I’m feeling a little like I’m at the end of my new grad-ness, and less like I identify with the issues that seem to be facing lots of new grads. I’m also stepping down as chair of NGAC as soon as new members have been recruited, so I can focus on a few other things in the year ahead. It’s been fun, but time to move on.

So, I blinked… and suddenly six months went by without a peep on this blog. Life has been doing what it does best - barreling along while I try to keep up. Where have I been? Right here, but buried under a pile of projects, a gaggle of committees, and a series of attempts at getting non-library, non-technology related hobbies.

Life’s not easing up but blogging has been on my mind lately, in more ways than one.

In my last post, I raised some questions measuring the success or otherwise of 2.0ish projects. I’m still thinking about this stuff - constantly. The time for me to evaluate mpow’s new blogging project is rapidly approaching, and I’m starting to look in earnest for literature on other libraries’ evaluations of similar projects. I’m still not turning up a lot.

I’m spending a fair bit of time thinking about what success for a project like this looks like. It’s a difficult thing to conceptualise. And obviously it’s something that needs to be conceptualised before you can figure out what sort of data you need to measure that success.

Of course, success for this project will be measured against our aims and objectives for the project - some of which relate to topics quite apart from the level of usage the blog has garnered, including aims like trialling blogging as a service delivery platform, and providing staff with an opportunity to get familiar and comfortable with blogging in the public domain (and with the technology itself).

But what other things should we be looking at? What, in general terms, makes a blog successful?

Conversational intensity

This is something I think a lot of bloggers get hung up on, so it gets its own sub heading. To what extent is success in blogging about “conversational intensity”?

We’re not getting a great deal of comments (I’ve got a theory about why that is, which I’ll probably blog about later), and I’m not particularly phased by that at this point. I had a chat with a colleague about the appropriateness of using blogs without being too concerned about generating conversation. She indicated she thought that a blog without multi-way conversation (ie with little commenting) misses the point of blogging. Her feeling is that conversation is a fundamental element of blogging.

I think I agree, to a certain extent, but I’m not convinced that blogs that exist without active commenting don’t have their own role to play. After all, we know that there are lots of different types of participants in this participatory web: consumers of information; occasional content producers (commenters); active content producers; and so on. (And this doesn’t even take into account the idea of using a blog as a CMS of sorts - people do great stuff with WordPress-driven websites. But that’s a little different.) Does it really matter if you don’t get a whole host of comments? Is there a ratio of comments to page views* that indicates a blog is successful in facilitating conversation?

In my opinion, level of conversation is a measure you should get hung up on only if it’s a primary aim for your blogging project.

Attributes of a successful blog

So, if the success of a blog does not hinge on conversational intensity, on what does it hinge (other than the blog’s aims and objectives)?

According to Asterisk, a successful blog is:

• Well written
• Frequently updated
• Consistent
• Open
• Responsive
• Well designed
• Aware of its audience
• Varied in topic
• Personal
• Thick skinned
• Honest
• Accountable
• Funny

Are these the kind of success measures against which libraries should be assessing their blogs? Are subjective measures like these valid? And how do we measure against them? These measures do appeal to me. Or some of them do - some are obviously personal preference things, and dependent on the type of blog (like funniness, for eg) but others could be useful.

An obvious thing to measure is readership - subscribers, site visits, post views and so forth. But how do you decide whether the level of readership is enough to mean success? And, in the case of our project, whether the level of readership is enough to warrant a transition from pilot to permanent service? Do we work with a ratio of site views for the blog versus site views for the library’s website? And if so, do we compare to page views for the library’s home page, or do we look at page views for the young people’s page on our website and compare to that? Do we look at site views for the blog versus population in our region for the target audience?

Is their any validity in looking at participation in polls? What if we created polls for the express purpose of getting a feel for the number of people who might participate? What would that tell us?

Clearly, my thoughts on evaluating blogging projects are still fairly nebulous, and I know I need to do some research outside the library field to see how (or even if) other industries are evaluating the success of customer facing, service oriented blogs. But I do want to here from other library-types on this, and it appears I aint gonna find what I need in the literature.

So now that that I’ve just suggested that conversation may not mean much in an assessment of a blog’s success, I’m going to try and start one. Tell me, readers (if there are any of you left, after my six month hiatus): what do you think the markers of a successful library-land blog might be? What are the attributes of a successful blog? If you were evaluating a blogging project, what data would you be collecting and what would you be comparing to? How would you decide if your blog is a success?

* Conversational intensity is often measured by dividing total comments by total posts, but I think another useful metric would be to get a feel for the number of visitors who feel compelled to get involved in a conversation.

There’s been plenty of talk around the Library 2.0 theme on the idea of evaluation or assessment. At Information Wants to be Free, Meredith Farkas says what she wanted to see come out of Library 2.0 was a greater focus on assessment. I certainly want to see libraries have a greater focus on assessment, too, and I want to see them publishing about it. (Particularly public libraries. We just don’t publish enough.)

Why aren’t we (libraries in general) publishing about the success (or failure) of our 2.0 projects? Why is there virtually no data to be found that quantifies some of the outcomes of 2.0 projects? We’ve been on this 2.0 bandwagon long enough for studies and assessments and evaluations to have been undertaken.  For a movement that’s intrinsically tied up with quick publishing channels like blogs and wikis, it seems strange that there is a real dearth of published studies on 2.0 projects. Why is that?

Walt Crawford had this to say in a recent post on his two blog survey books:

Maybe there’s a clear desire not to know how library blogs are doing in the real world, other than a few cherry-picked examples. I’d like to think that’s not the case. It would be unprofessional to tell people about how wonderful library blogs are, and encourage them to create such blogs, without giving them honest and broad-ranging information on what’s actually happening with such blogs.

I’d like to think that’s not the case, too. But I wonder. I wonder a few things:

• Is the lack of publishing indicative of a lack of success? (And a fear of talking about it?)
• Is the lack of publishing indicative of a perceived lack of success, a perception that might be formed because we’re not collecting the right data? (eg. How are we measuring ROI? Do we just count comments on blog posts? Or do we look at exit links, time spent on the page, holds on titles blogged about, impact on online resource usage stats…? I certainly hope all of these metrics and more are informing libraries’ evaluations of their blogs, because if we’re just relying on comments to measure user engagement, then we’re not seeing the full picture.)
• Is the lack of publishing indicative of a lack of evaluation? (And if so, why aren’t we evaluating? Because we don’t know how? Because we don’t have time? Because we don’t want to know?)
• Or, is it just that we’re not publishing about our evaluations?

I’ve got a blogging project in the pipeline at mpow. It’s germinating quite slowly, because I want to see it well planned. We want a well planned implementation, but also a well planned, multi-faceted evaluation. If it works, I want to know about it, and I want us to be able to reflect on what we did and make links to what worked. If it doesn’t work, I want to know about it just as much (if not more), because I want to be able to reflect on what we did, look for ways we could improve, and ultimately, pull the pin if that’s what we need to do.

Blogs (and all things shiny and 2.0) are just great. They’re fun for staff to work on, and have huge potential to engage our users. But none of us have time to run services that don’t work. If we don’t evaluate, we have no ability to know whether

We know that “because we always did it that way” is not a good reason to keep doing the things we’ve always done, whether they work or not. But neither should a failure to evaluate be the reason we keep on keeping on with our 2.0 services.

If you have evaluated your 2.0 service, publish about it! And if you have published, I’d love to receive some links.