Steve Ely

Cornette’s blog

All my blogging for the past couple of weeks has been on the blog of the Cornette Library of West Texas A&M University, where I work as a reference librarian.  All of my productive efforts on the web at home in the evening this week has revolved around trying to get a sense of what other academic libraries are doing with their blogs and how that’s working out for them.  There are certainly a lot of academic librarians with blogs.  But all the instances I know are personal sites of individuals writing about their professional interests (similar to this site, but better).  I know there are blogs being used by academic libraries themselves, but I don’t know the scope of it.   How many libraries are there with blogs, how are those blogs being used, how often are they being updated, how are they being promoted, and how successful are they for any given purpose?

The Cornette blog has mostly been used as a platform for announcing news about new resources, hours changes, outages, exhibts, staff changes, database changes, and that kind of thing.    There’s a little box on the main library page that excerpts the most recent post in the New & Notable category, so everyone visiting the site sees the most recent news and can take a look at the archives on the rest of the blog if they want.  It’s really the only way to guarantee success with an academic library blog, I think: ensure that the gist of whatever must be seen is necessarily seen by anyone visiting the library site at all (not just the blog itself).  As a result, you require no regular, returning readership of the blog for the content to have the intended effect.  If someone needs the information, they can find it.   If no one did, well, it needed to be there just in case.

I’m hoping to build on it more, though, and use it as sort of an outreach tool to get people more interested in what we have and how they can use it.  I mean to write about somewhat less urgent and essential matters.   Somewhat less matter-of-fact.  Still factual, certainly, but with more opinion or detailed scrutiny of a given resource, text, technique, or whatever subject.  Things that (I hope) are interesting and useful to any possible readers but things that it would have been perfectly reasonable to never have put up a web page talking about.

So far I’ve written there about the history of the Cornette library, how awesome subject-specific encyclopedias are, using hidden field codes in EBSCOhost, using LC Subject Headings in the OPAC, the nuances of searching across the full text of articles in EBSCOhost, what tools we have for searching for old newspaper articles (pre-1990s, especially), and the odd and interesting things about one particular subject encyclopedia.    I have a lot of ideas for where else this’ll go and in what ways I’ll build on some of these precedents, but projecting what you will write about, I’ve learned, is kind of pointless.   So let’s just see what happens.  Hopefully, though, it’ll be ideas and information interesting and useful to all library users but, of course, particularly Cornette’s.  Therefore particularly WT students.

Anyway, with this kind of approach, success is somewhat more of an open question.  The blog will always remain valuable, for the purposes discussed in the second paragraph above.   But my writing all this other stuff on it is clearly falling short of its principal goal if nobody ever reads it.  I definitely gain a lot of knowledge through the act of researching, thinking through, and writing a lot of the posts.  But I’m not writing just for that purpose.  If that was the main point, I’d do it here.   So while I’m happy to gain a lot of personal benefit from these posts, the focus with it has to be on directing it as much as possible toward Cornette’s patrons, especially the students.  I want to create something of interest and benefit to them and present it in such a way as to draw their attention toward it.

I can better accomplish that with detailed knowledge of what others are doing in this regard elsewhere.  That’s why I’m researching that question, as I mentioned above.  I was going to get into that here, but I need to sleep now, so I’ll return to that at a later time.