Is it the end of an era for librarian blogging?

 

Update: the day after posting this, I'm adding a little disclaimer: I am NOT saying blogging is finished! I'm saying a specific era is possibly coming to an end. And I still think blogging is, for information professionals, still extremely useful, very rewarding, and a great thing to do. Okay, glad that's sorted.

Recently Andy Woodworth blogged about how he wasn't blogging that much any more, and today @tinamreynolds sparked a debate on Twitter about whether the library bloggging community was slowing down, and if so, why?

I've definitely noticed this. There was a set of around 10 blogs that diverted into an 'Essentials' folder in my Google Reader which I read all the time, and there was at least 30 more that I regularly caught up with. But hardly any of the bloggers in question are producing regular articles in 2013. I don't really use a Reader any more - I just pick stuff up via Twitter. I don't blog nearly as much as I used to - and when I do it tends to be about things which happened ages ago (my last post, published late last week, was about an event which happened in February, 3 months back).

Lack of time is the biggest reason given for not blogging these days, and that makes a lot of sense. But I think it might be a changing of the guard, rather than an overall slow-down - a bunch of new professionals becoming older professionals, and newer ones attacking the biblioblogosphere with a fervor in their place. If we interact online in loosely defined sets (in my case, it's largely 'the people who were new professionals in 2009 when I went to the new professionals conference') then it stands to reason that there would be a collective ebb and flow in our activity. As we get up the career ladder we become busier and have less time to blog, and we're on similar cycles of activity, commitments, and enthusiasm...

I really, really enjoyed being part of a thriving, dynamic online community of info-pro bloggers. But I don't miss it now it's gone.

For me though it's not just lack of time - it's lack of energy for the profession itself. I think I'd make time if it was all as important to me as it used to be. Which isn't to say it's not important - I'm quite passionate about libraries, and still very passionate about librarians and our community. But I said a LOT of things on this blog in the first 3 years or so I wrote it, and that level of momentum - that fire - wasn't really sustainable. There are librarians whose CPD is seemingly never subject to atrophy - I admire that, but don't aspire towards it, weirdly.

I just don't have that much to say anymore. I used to write posts like this one, about the state of play - I used to love it when lots of people commented and we had a big debate about stuff. But now when I write things on here it tends to be more focused and specific: the last four posts have been about an online tool, a marketing idea, an event, and a presentation. These kinds of posts don't get as many views as the old debate type posts, but the blog gets more views overall because there's now so much of it for Google to find!

So if you blog, do you blog less now than you used to? Is it the end of an era for librarian blogging? And if so, to what do you attribute this - is it just lack of time, or are there other reasons too?

p.s just as I was about to hit publish on this, I saw this tweet from @barlowjk which sums up one of the problems very nicely - we have finite mental real estate! And SO much stuff filling it up these days...

Information Literacy in the Digital Age

At York we have something called the PGCAP - it's basically certification all new academics have to go through, the Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice. The Library runs one of the classes the academics can take, and this year I delivered it. The brief was to talk about what we do to make our students information literate, but actually what the academics on the course wanted to talk about was how THEY could become information literate... Luckily I'd put a little bit about this into the presentation - some useful tools for digital literacy. Here's the presentation I used - this, incidentally, took me not much time because it's a Prezi template. They've put in a LOT of actually-quite-useful templates in of late, so have a look if you've not checked them in a while. It's officially now much quicker to make a nice Prezi than it is to make a nice PowerPoint.

It turned out to be quite an enjoyable session - very informal and with lots of discussion (going both ways - I was soliciting their views as well as telling them mine / the Library's). The feedback was very good, up a lot on the previous version of this session I'd been involved in. But I was really struck by how much the academics wanted to know about the tools themselves (when I described my '6 essential tools to make your academic life easier' class I run for my 1st years, a few of the academics said that basically they needed to go on something like that) so as part of my role on the University-wide Learning and Teaching Forum, I've set up a workshop called '#EdTech: 9 useful educational tools, to engage, communicate and keep up to date in the academic environment'. That's happening on Monday, so I'll report back on how it goes.

It really does seem like the time is ripe for Library's to run these kinds of sessions - the academic world is ready for it and understanding of how useful it might potentially be for them...

The ridiculous reach of Slideshare

I'm always banging on about Slideshare.net to anyone who'll listen - I think it's the great underrated social network, the secret weapon of communication. And people do listen - whether it's librarians on presentation skills or social media courses, or academics on web 2.0 / edtech courses, people are amazed at the reach Slideshare can provide. An example I like to give is of a presentation I created a couple of years back called The Time For Libraries Is Now - it's essentially pro-library propaganda packaged up in such a way that non-librarians will hopefully look at it. I've only given that presentation once to a room full of people, but it's been viewed around 70,000 times online - that's the equivalent of my having presented at Wembley Stadium! It's more or less the same amount of effort, for hundreds of times the audience and reach, and that makes Slideshare invaluable. People LOVE to share presentations, they tweet links to them, they talk about them on Facebook, they embed them on their own blogs and sites - and they view them a lot more readily than they'll read an article or a blogpost. It's all about packaging up a message for maximum impact; I've said before on this blog, that if I have something really important to say, I'll say it with slides.  Here's my Slideshare profile. Anyhow, Slideshare have just started emailing users with updates on how their decks are doing. This week I got this:

What struck me (apart from the fact that the Tweets / FB stats are wrong for some reason) is the sheer number of views per week - for things I've already done, and don't update or even regularly add to. Around 2 thousand views a week! This blog gets around 2,500 views a week (unless I actually write a blog post in a given week, in which case hopefully it goes up a bit...) and that's with an archive of 100s of posts for Google to find - Slideshare only has about 25 of my presentations on and yet that many people are receiving the messages I've put out there. (Plus, only four of my blogposts have had over 10,000 views, let alone 50 or 70,000.)

So, information professionals with something to say - make a nice slidedeck and get it on Slideshare. Libraries with key messages for users and potential users - by all means use all the usual channels, but use Slideshare as well! Got some new facilities? Make a slide deck about it, full of nice pictures of those facilities, and embed it on your library homepage. Got some new courses coming up? Create a PowerPoint with what the courses are, why they'll benefit the users, and some quotes from previously satisfied customers - stick it on Slideshare and embed it on your bookings page. Teaching information skills? Put the PowerPoint on Slideshare afterwards so your students can refer back to it.

In terms of getting your message to stick, and generally making slide decks which are nice enough to get shared a lot on Slideshare (and perhaps picked up and featured on their homepage, which guarentees a huge amount of exposure), here's some tips I've previously posted on here - on a slidedeck of course!

Good presentations matter from Ned Potter

And if you're interested and haven't seen it, here's the Time For Libraries Is Now deck I mentioned at the top of the piece.

The time for Libraries is NOW from Ned Potter

Digital Marketing Toolkit workshop, 21st May, Edinburgh

Next month I'm running a workshop on marketing information services using new technologies. It's a course I really enjoy teaching - during the full-day we discuss marketing with video, mobile, online publishing, geolocation (Foursquare), actual real-life useful things to do with QR Codes, social media... The emphasis as always is on talking not just about why they're relevant, but what actual next-steps you might take towards using them.

The course is being put on by UKeIG - full details can be found on their website.

Here's some pariticpant feedback from last time we ran it:

• Really useful, great delivery. Thanks!
• Brilliant workshop, well done!
• Perfect; taught me more about things I was using and also some new
• Excellent day
• Very informative, paced well
• Hugely useful
• Thought it was a great overview, got a lot from it .

So, I hope to you see some of you there!

Repeat after me: host content externally, embed content locally

Reblogged from the Library Marketing Toolkit Modern library websites now have ALL KINDS of content. Where there used to be lots of text and a few images, there's now much more dynamic content. We've got presentations, videos, audio, even embedded documents. This opens up a great opportunity to reach more and varied people.

It is possible to host all this stuff on your own website. But why do that when you can host them externally, and just embed them locally? It will save you an enormous amount of bandwidth, but more importantly, it will make your content infinitely more discoverable. We can't rely on people going right to the Library wesbite; we have to show up in their Google searches too.

As we all know, a lot of people don't know what libraries can do these days. If we host our content elsewhere on the internet, we're going to the people rather than relying on them guessing that the library might be the one to help. We're showing up in their searches. We're appearing on the platforms they frequent anyway. We're boosting our reputation among other libraries.

If you host a video on YouTube it will get views from people browsing that platform, as well as the views it will get embedded in your library website. The same applies for images which, if they're magnificent Special Collections images for example, you could put on Flickr in their own group, and embed them in the Library website (and why not set a up a Tumblr blog or a Pinterest board for them while you're at it?).

If you have Prezi or Slideshare presentations these can be picked up and featured by the hosting sites, leading to an exponentially increased audience. The same goes for PDFs too - host them on Issuu.com (like the new case studies for this website) or Scribd.com and they look good, get a lot more use (because people know what they're getting without having to open a file) and could become featured documents.

The Twitter for research PDF I recently uploaded to Scribd, to my organisation's account, was seen by around 3,000 people in its first two weeks of publication, because Scribd featured it on their homepage. So it was very useful locally, because putting on Scribd meant we could embed it locally making it more useable for our staff and students. But it was also useful internationally because it helped our institution reach a large audience, as a provider of useful guidance in an emerging area.

And what about Library news - why write it on the library website itself when you can host it on a blog and embed the RSS feed on your own site? Basically anything you think of can be hosted externally, embedded locally. What this means is you are AMPLIFYING your content and increasing discoverability - essentially, the work you put into your resources is going to be more richly rewarded.

So, repeat after me! Host externally, embed locally