Why have an institutional blog?

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If you work for a non-profit institution, the chances are you could benefit from having a blog. Libraries, charities, academic departments, pressure groups, research projects - in all of these cases if you have a static website, it's worth adding a blog too (and if you're about to create a static website, stop! Create a blog instead, and just include all the other pages you'd planned).

Forgot what you might have heard about blogs dying or being 'over', blogs are great for non-profit organisations. Ultimately they're just a way of getting information online, either to show people or for them to find on their own. It doesn't matter if people don't subscribe to your blog, or even if they understand whether or not it IS a blog at all. It's just a way to connect people with that they need.

Why are blogs so great? What matters is what they do for your audience. They make your information easier to find, and easier to use. There are a number of key reasons it's worth setting one up for the types of institutions listed above.

1. Blogging platforms come mobile-ready

This is essential now - already the world accesses the internet more on mobile devices than on desktops. People check for information on the go, wherever they are. You need to greet people with a mobile option. Wordpress, Blogger, Tumblr - all of these automatically create attractive, functional mobile versions of your blog (and its associated site). This particularly vital if your main institutional website ISN'T mobile ready - for example if you're an academic department trying to attract new students, and your wider University site only has a desktop version for now. 

2. Google loves blogs

By which I mean, blogs tend to be ranked highly by Search Engines.

Google - and every other Search Engine - likes regularly updated content, and so ranks blogs better accordingly. Google doesn't ACTUALLY love blogs (first it got rid of its RSS Reader, and now the very useful Google Blog Search has been given the push too) but due to the fact that new, well tagged and and well described content is consistently being added to the site via blog posts, there's more for Google to find. Another major thing search engines like is incoming links - people linking to your site from theirs. This is more likely to happen if you publish engaging content regularly than if you have a static site with basic 'About' information on it.

You don't need to become obsessed with SEO or to frantically chase hits to your site - you just want the maximum number of relevant people to find the content you create, with the minimum of fuss. Blogs help with this.

3. You can have URLs for everything

People share things with their network and with their peers all the time. And the way they do this is to point people to a link - a URL - and say 'have a look at this useful content'. A blog allows you to do this well: each post has its own URL, so each set of information can be discretely linked to.

This is much more desirable than the alternatives.

• If you have ALL your information on one webpage this becomes harder to do ('have a look at this useful content, 3/5ths of the way down the page, buried under that less relevant stuff')
• Or even worse, if you just put the info in emails so people have to copy and paste the text and can only really send it on via another email
• Or, worse still, have the info in a PDF so no one ever looks at in the first place let alone shares it
• OR, perhaps worst of all, simply delete the info on a static page and replace it with new info as you go along, meaning there's no legacy for anything you've done online

An institutional blog helps you to curate your own information and ideas more effectively, and makes it easy for others to find and then share with their peers. 

4. Blogs are easy to use

As anyone who was wrestled with an institutional Content Management System will attest, the value of just being able to Put Something Online quickly and easily is not to be underestimated... Blogs are simple to use - if you can use Microsoft Word then you're 99% of the way there in terms of writing posts - and it's a great way of linking to and embedding multimedia.

There are no barriers between needing to put something online and being able to do so, which is hugely useful for organisations.

5. Blogs are actually a very easy way of building a regular website

Although the specific blog-posting features are useful for all the reasons listed above, in terms of creating a regular website the blogging platforms are probably the easiest way to go about it. Increasingly there are good website-making tools available, some of which I've lined up for review on this very blog a bit later on, but you either have to pay, or compromise on things like bandwidth limits in a way the blogging platforms don't require you to do.

I built my band's website in Wordpress because that was the quickest, easiest way to make an attractive and fully-featured site - the actual blogging is a very minor part of what that site is for.

6. Blogs are free

Last but not least, your org doesn't need to put any financial investment into creating a blog. Blogger and Wordpress (and Tumblr) are free to use.

You CAN spend money if you want to. I recently created this site, using Wordpress, for the Learning & Teaching Forum at the University of York.

Click to go to yorkforum.org - created in Wordpress.com

It took less than 3 hours to complete (thanks to the power of Wordpress's brilliant platform) and although we could have done it for free, we went for the 'Premium' option - for $99 per year we get our own domain name, more storage space, a wider selection of visual themes, and the promise that no advertising will appear on our pages. However, you may not require those features - I've also run lots of completely free Wordpress sites (and Blogger sites) which have worked absolutely fine.

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What are the downsides of having a blog? It takes time to upkeep - and a sad, neglected blog can sometimes do more harm than not having a blog at all. The key is to link the blog in with your daily activities, rather than constantly casting about for things to blog about or people to write posts - so in the Learning & Teaching Forum example above, the blog is about events, workshops, and the regular magazine - and most of the rest of the site is populated by appropriately tagged blogposts too, meaning the upkeep is low.

Make sure several people have owner permissions of your institutional blog - you don't want to lose access if one member of staff leaves... And it's good to share the burden.

So if you don't currently have an institutional blog and I've convinced you to set one up, where do you start? Here's a guide to the four main blogging platforms. I'd recommend Wordpress, and eConsultancy have an absolutely comprehensive guide to setting up a good Wordpress site, so have a read of that.

Good luck!

Digital Scholarship Training at @UniofYork: Facts and Figures

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Andy Priestner has written about the importance of writing reports, even if no one asks you to, to showcase the value of what the Library is doing.

“...it is not enough just to collate this data and wait to be asked for it. It is far better to ensure that the people who need to know this stuff are informed, at least once a year, of these top level statistics, before they ask for them: a pre-emptive strike if you like…”

— Andy Priestner in Business School Libraries in the 21st Century, edited by Tim Wales

(You can read a larger excerpt from his chapter here.)

With that in mind, a while ago I produced an internal report on the Digital Scholarship Training I've run at York (and various exciting things happened as a result of doing this) - which I've now expanded into an external version, which includes the Google Apps for Education training run by my colleagues.

My message to you is that if you have any expertise in the area of digital scholarship, scholarly comms, Web 2.0 in HE etc, find a way to offer it to your academic community! As I've mentioned before, we've found they're ready for it, and excited about the opportunities.

Below is a tweaked version of the report to include the message in the paragraph above - the original version (which can be found on our Library slideshare page) is aimed at York staff and asks them to get in touch for information about upcoming events. Putting it on our Slideshare page will hopefully increase the profile of something very positive for the Library and IT - we've both found that there's been some reputational gain from helping people out with things they really value right now, rather than solely focusing on what we've always done. We've also both found that word is starting to spread and we're becoming go-to people within the University when help or advice is required in these areas, which is excellent.

Digital Scholarship at York from Ned Potter

There's more about the nature of the training itself in this blog post on the Networked Researcher suite of workshops, and this later post about how the training is shifting slightly.

#BLAle14 Tuning out the white noise in library communication

A lot of the communication between Libraries and academic departments is just white noise, unless we tailor and personalise it. This takes a large amount of time, but the returns you get are absolutely huge - and this is the basis of my #BLAle14 keynote, a version of which is here:.

Tuning out the white noise: marketing your library services from Ned Potter

For context, here's the Twitter back-channel during the presentation - divided into sections so you can read along with the slides if you're especially keen. There's more on the conference itself below the Storify.

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The BLA

I became a Business Librarian this year, when I took over looking after the York Management School alongside my other departments in January. I also took over our membership of the Business Librarians Association and have been looking forward to the BLA Annual Conference, which everyone told me was excellent. And it was! I had a great time, it was great to catch up with old friends and make new ones, and I very much appreciate Nathan and the organisers inviting me to speak. As I said in my talk, I've found the BLA to be an extremely useful and helpful organisation to be a part of, so if anyone reading this looks after a Business School but isn't a member, I'd recommend signing up.

I was only able to attend two days of the conference but for me the highlights included:

• The National Space Centre where we were lucky enough to experience a Key Stage 2 film all about The Stars and that in the Planet-arium
• Very nice accomodation as part of the conference venue which made everything extremely easy - it's much more relaxing never having to worry about travelling from a hotel etc, so other conference organisers take note
• A very interesting presentation about The Hive in Worcester - the UK's first joint public and academic library, from Stephanie Allen. I have to admit it never even occured to me that a public-academic library was possible, but although it sounds complicated Stephanie made a pretty convicing case for it being a great idea. It sounds like a great place - generally I have no interest in Libraries as places but I'd quite like to visit The Hive...
• Joanne Farmer showing us Northampton's very nicely done video on employability (which she scripted)
• Andy Priestner's very engaging talk about how UX in Libraries is very much a thing now - here's Andy's presentation on Slideshare, take a look .

I was sad to miss Aidan Smith's presentation on Occupye, used at Birbeck to show where there is seating free in the Library - this won the best short paper prize.

I thought the organisers did a great job, and it was the first conference I'd been to since LIASA so it felt great to be at that kind of event again. Thanks for having me!

Twitter for Researchers guide

At my institution we're really stepping up our support for researchers, and I've been doing a lot of stuff around the Web 2.0 end of the spectrum. I'm running a suit of workshops called Becoming a Networked Researcher, and I've been into departments to give taster presentations like this one:

We've also finally completed a guide to using Twitter for Researchers. It's more a Twitter for Researchers actually, rather than the process of academic research itself (although that is possible). I've hosted it on Scribd in order to embed it on our web pages, and it got picked up and featured on Scribd's homepage so that helped boost the number of views it has had, which is huge, relatively speaking - around three-and-a-half-thousand. Plenty of those have been from York researchers, which is great - they've given us a lot of positive feedback and ReTweets.

The guide took a surprisingly long time to do - the difference between knowing stuff and actually writing an ideal version of it down in a document never ceases to disappoint me... Adding examples took a while too. I couldn't decide between very brief of very comprehensive - in the end I decided somewhere between the two, keeping it as short as possible but including a LOT of information. The idea is, if they want more, they can come to the Twitter workshop as part of the Becoming a Networked Researcher suite.

Anyhow, here it is - feel free to use stuff from it, with attribution:

Twitter for research by University of York Information

There'll be some more University of York Library stuff on the blog shortly, around Digital Literacy, videos etc!

- thewikiman