virtually a librarian

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.

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.

From Joho the Blog, written by David Weinberger of Everything is Miscellaneous fame, comes this little gem of a haiku:

When the doors open
the library’s early birds
use wifi indoors.

Funny, and how very true.

Also true (unfortunately) is this one in the post’s comments:

If the earlybirds
Try to use wifi outside
Police harass them.
– AKMA

Hmmmm. So few words, so much said.

[Aside: Joho the Blog is full of goodness. I highly recommend it.]

Ok, so it’s Blog Day… The mandate is to recommend five new blogs. But here’s the thing: This morning, when I started trawling through the nearly 100 subscriptions in my feed reader looking for blogs to post for my first Blog Day entry, I realised I’m not really subscribed to anything all that new. Much as I’d love to spend the next few hours trawling for new and exciting blogs to post about, I’ve just spent the entire day procrastinating about writing an assignment, a conference paper and a committee paper (yup, I wrote not a single word, besides those you’ll find on this blog), so the situation is now dire and I must do some work.

So here’s my list for this year. Let’s call it “New to my feed reader, though not necessarily new”

• lo-fi librarian: Great weekly list of useful tools, and other gems in between.
• Everything is miscellaneous: The companion blog to the book of the same name. I will get round to reading this book one day. [Aside: I think I'm going to start getting into audio books. It would be so good to cram some reading in to the 6 or 7 hours I spend in the car between Monday and Friday each week. I might wait til this comes out as an audio book.]
• apophenia: the blog of danah boyd, authority on social network sites (you might have caught the hoopla about her recent blog essay on the way American class divisions are played out on Facebook and MySpace). This is a great read if you’re interested in the phenomenon of social network sites and youth culture. A really thoughtful and thought provoking blog.
• iLibrarian: Ok so this one is actually new, and it’s been picked up on a number of Blog Day lists. Written by Ellyssa Kroski, who also writes InfoTangle, this blog has offered some great posts lately, including a list of resources on gaming in libraries and a guide to Twitter in libraries. Gold.
• Ypulse: This blog’s tagline is “daily news & commentary about Generation Y for media and marketing professionals”. Anyone who knows me even a little knows I’m a typical Gen Yer, and also that I’ve got a bit of an interest in generational theory. So my motivations for reading this blog are pretty obvious. But it’s also quite a fun read, and I’d argue it’s essential reading if you’ve got anything to do with delivering youth services.

BlogDay

Roy Tennant analogises about the recent war of words triggered by a post from the Anonymous Librarian on twopointopians.

Tenant starts out his post on this topic by admitting to his tendency to stay out of the way of religious wars. Indeed, the fervour illustrated in both the comments on the AL’s post (all 52 of them) and all the counter-posts on other blogs does indeed smack of the kind of fervour that often springs up around religion. And the terminology? Cult. 2.0 gospel. Manifesto. Sacred. Mantra. There’s a thesis here in the language choices, alone, let alone in the play out of the us vs them polarisation.

Anyhoo, the real point of this post was to comment on what Tenant alludes to as Meredith Farkas’ voice of reason. I actually read Meredith’s post in response to the AL’s before I read the AL’s post, so I came to it with no real understanding of what inspired it. What resonated for me, then, wasn’t how well Meredith had responded to the whole thread, but just how well she articulated the fact that every service we implement, every Web2.0 initiative we embark on, must be informed by a need:

I have dealt with a lot of people who are like kids in a candy store when it comes to these technologies. Like someone who told me the other day that Flickr is the logical next thing libraries should have after a blog (never mind whether there’s a need for either of them or not, I suppose). I used to be one of those kids in a candy store. I remember when I came to Norwich over two years ago, eager to implement blogs, wikis, etc. And a lot of the initial things I tried to implement failed. Why? Because I put the tool before the need…

Hallelujah! I’m the first to want to play with shiny new stuff, but as I’ve said before, the need has got to come before the tool.

Library2.0 (or twopointopia) is about creating user-centred services, and, where appropriate, harnessing technology to help us do it. It’s not about the technology.

This is the most insightful blog post around Library2.0 I’ve read in a while. It should be mandatory reading for all Library/Learning2.0 programs. It’s certainly something I’ll be sharing with my colleagues, as we think about the services our users want from us and the tools available to us to deliver them.

Take a look at Lorcan Dempsey’s post on professional communication, and the Librarian in Black’s response.

There are two issues here for me: firstly, the issue of rigour; and secondly, the disconnect between the literature and practice, or the applicability of the truly rigorous literature.

1. Rigour

The Librarian in Black makes this comment:

The funny thing is that when I started library school (coming from an Literature Master’s degree), I criticized library professional literature up and down. Much of the writing was sloppy, there was very little research done to back up points in many of the articles we were given to read, citations were only done sometimes, and flaws in logic (usually over-generalizations) were found in just about everything I read.

Ah, ditto! I raged about the state of the literature throughout my Grad Dip. In fact, I continue to rage. So I found myself furiously nodding as I read this paragraph. The LiB, however, goes on to say:

Now, I find that all of that literature was coming from more casual publications, not the refereed journals that we’re talking about here.

So here’s the crux of the first issue: when it comes to formal professional publications and conference papers, I don’t know that I agree with LiB. The degree of rigour in the library literature still disappoints me, at times. Go to any library conference, and you’ll see a whole lot of “we did this and it was cool cause it worked”, and not so much of “we identified this issue, took this approach to gathering data to inform our decision, implemented and evaluated this project, and these are our findings”. And I’m talking about conferences where peer review is involved.

2. Disconnect

LiB says

So…what need do our professional publications fill? Are they filling supply or demand? Do we keep these going because the content really is useful for our real live librarians? Generally, I would say no–at least nobody I know in public libraries.

Here, I agree with the LiB wholeheartedly. In my opinion, our professional literature is disconnected from practice, and often lacks applicability in a practical context - particularly in a public library context. This frustrates me no end. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve gone to the literature, looking to find some data to support a decision I need to make. And it’s often just not there, even though I know there are other libraries out there grappling with the same issue I am.

But why is it not there? Partly, as the LiB says, because the literature that comes out of the US (which makes up a big chunk of the ’scholarly’ publishing we have available to us) is driven by the tenure requirements of academic librarianship and grounded in theory.

But it’s also because, as a profession (and I’m referring here to practitioners) that values information and the sharing of knowledge and ideas, and that ostensibly values scholarly information above all else (a whole issue in itself), we are woeful when it comes to conducting our own research and documenting it in the literature. Our journals should be brimming over with content. Editors should be fighting authors off with sticks. But that’s not the case, is it?

I’m a big believer in evidence based practice. I want to make informed decisions, and I know the value that documented evidence has when you’re trying to persuade someone to go with an idea. Part of being committed to evidence based practice is being committed to writing and publishing. We need a good base of professional literature to inform our practice. And we’re the only ones that can build it.

Practitioners need to spend time taking an evidence based approach to their practice, and publishing somewhere (anywhere - more on that below) about the outcomes. Because that’s the only way the literature is ever going to be relevant and useful to practitioners.

[Aside: Actually, it's not the only way. Another way we can shape our literature to give it meaning for practitioners is for us to rethink the divide between academia and practice, or at least, to encourage partnerships across the divide.]

Which leads me to issue three (I said two issues, didn’t I? And you thought I was done ranting!)…

3. Blogs vs scholarly communication: what’s the difference?

Right now, we’re still negotiating whether blogs are a legitimate part of professional literature. My personal opinion is that yes, they certainly are. If Jo at Library X posts about his experience with Y issue, she’s contributing to the professional literature.

Blog reading has a huge influence on my professional practice. Blog posts get me thinking about issues that probably wouldn’t cross my radar otherwise. There are, however, differences between the way I use blog posts and the way I use ‘traditionally published’ professional literature. Blog posts get me thinking and challenge me to do new things. But what blogs don’t provide me with is the documented evidence I need to inform my decision making. Not in themselves, anyway. People don’t typically publish the findings of their projects on blogs. But what people do use blogs for is to point to findings published elsewhere.

Wouldn’t it be great if we could harness the speed and accessibility offered by blogs to publish our rigorous, scholarly, evidence-based professional communications, rather than just to point to them? Then blogs really would form part of the “most compelling and worthwhile literature in the library field today“. So why don’t we do it? Now there’s a thought…

[A final aside: Lorcan Dempsey notes that with regard to blogs, he has a "continuing sense that that this is still a fugitive medium. This means that an entry can be dispatched relatively quickly." I wish! It seems to take me a disproportionately long time to blog, compared to writing for other forums. I think for me, that's due in large part to the fact that blogging is almost entirely about thinking out issues, so I'm not coming to a post with my thoughts formulated, the way I would for other pieces of writing. Interesting.]