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.
Wow. Thanks for the comment–just about the first there’s been on this book (or at least the first favorable), in about a year since it came out. I was just about to put the book out of print; maybe I’ll modify that decision, at least for the downloadable version.
Your penultimate paragraph makes a lot of sense, particularly for library blogs (as opposed to liblogs).
I would love to continue this and the parallel academic library blog study, with some different levels of analysis, since even on a purely-external basis you can find out a lot. But I can’t do it based on the proceeds from selling fewer than a hundred books (that’s both studies combined): It’s a prohibitively poor use of my time. So, barring sponsorship (from a library school, vendor, or whoever), it’s not going to happen. Sigh.
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