virtually a librarian

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.

February was a big month for me, with a paper at Beyond the Hype, a paper at VALA, a week away at Aurora (and subsequent brain explosion) and the roll out of two multi-session city wide computer training programs for customers. Consequently I’m only just catching up on some biblioblogospheric happenings. I haven’t had much of an opportunity to think out what I’m about to say, so it will be brief, and (I give you fair warning!) nebulous. But here goes:

I’ve been reading a bit about Chris Anderson’s recent article in Wired entitled Free - why $0.00 is the future of business. And I should confess up front that I haven’t read the article itself yet, so I’m almost certain to be missing the point here, to a degree.
There’s been some talk about promoting the free-ness of library services. Now, the first thing that jumped into my head when I started reading some of the posts that have cropped up in this conversation was this:

Library services are often not free at all. Our customers very often pay for the services we provide. In the case of public libraries, they pay for our services through their rates.

So, do we market our services as free? Or do we market them as the quality services they are, with the line that “you’re paying for them, so why not get the most you possibly can out of them”?

More on this to come, I’m sure.

I stumbled across this amusing gem from the Annoyed Librarian tonight, while trying to deal with my well overflowing feed reader in a slightly more productive way than hitting ‘mark all as read’.

But then, I may as well just hit that oft maligned button, given that more than half the posts are from library blogs and will therefore say nothing, repeat themselves, link to images I don’t want to see, or be full of recipes and advice I’m not interested in. Pah! ‘Mark all as read’, here I come!

The Other Librarian makes a really useful analogy about swimming and the web. If we want to protect our kids from drowning, we teach them to swim, and we supervise them. Ideally, if we don’t know how to swim, we could (should?) learn to swim ourselves so we can save them if the need arises. It’s a no-brainer, right?

The same should apply for the web. To ’save’ kids from the potential ‘dangers’ of the web, we should teach them to swim (or surf safely). And if we aren’t the best swimmers (or surfers) ourselves, we should send them to a swimming (or web) school where they can learn what they need to know. Better still, if we only know how to tread water, we should send ourselves to swimming (or web) school too. And then we should be the lifeguards by the pool, giving advice.

We don’t drain every pool, pond, or other water-holding vessel our children are going to come into contact with to save them from drowning. We teach them how to deal with the water - and have fun in it. I wonder, is filtering Internet content akin to draining our pools of water?

Thanks for the analogy, Ryan. I love a good analogy (clearly, cause I just went to town with this one). This is one issue that I’ll personally find a lot easier to talk about with this kind of simple, on-the-money analogy up my sleeve.