Internet Librarian International (ILI) 2008

Using Blogs effectively within your Library: 15 October 2008

Background

Marieke Guy and Ann Chapman were speakers and facilitators at a workshop on "Using Blogs effectively within your Library" held at Novotel London West on 15 October 2008. This event is part of the pre-conference workshop programme of the Internet Librarian International Conference 2008. Further information is available on the ILI 2008 web site.

Abstract

The potential benefits of blogging in a library context have been widely discussed. This workshop will provide practical advice on ways to overcome potential barriers to the establishment of blogs in an institution, deploy a blogging service that satisfies institutions' requirements, embed the service in a sustainable fashion and demonstrate its value to the institution. It will offer practical experiences with the issues of using blogs in your library. And, since setting up a blog is only half the story, the workshop will also look at how to measure its success.

Timetable

The timetable is given below.

Time	Session	Comment
14.00 to 14.20	Introduction	Marieke Guy
14.20 to 14.27	Case Study 1: Thoughts from a novice blogger [Presentation]	Ann Chapman
14.28 to 14.35	Case Study 2: The JISC PoWR blog [Presentation]	Marieke Guy
14.35 to 15.00	Group discussion 1: Why have a blog?
15.00 to 15.15	Why have a blog? The library context [Presentation]	Ann Chapman
15.15 to 15.35	Break
15.35 to 16.00	Group discussion 2: What are the barriers?
16.00 to 16.15	Addressing the barriers [Presentation]	Marieke Guy
16.15 to 16.40	Group discussion 3: Deploying the blog
16.40 to 16.55	Best practice with blogs [Group discussion notes]	These slides record the points raised in the group discussion session
16.55 to 17.00	Final remarks	Marieke Guy and Ann Chapman

Accompanying Resources

For a list of related resources please see the del.icio.us social bookmarking Web site (for the tag 'ili2008blog').

Accompanying Resources

A number of video blog posts have been produced to support this workshop. These are available on the Seesmic video blog service and are included below:

Why do I blog? [link]
How do I find ideas to blog about? [link]
How do I find the time to blog? [link]
Is blogging rewarding? [link]
Do I comment on other people's blogs?
Is blogging for everyone? [link]
How should you get started blogging? [link]
What's best - a team blog or an individual's blog? [link]
What are the pros and cons of externally-hosted blogs versus in-house blogs? [link]