ARLD Cooperative Blogging Project
Call for Participation
Inspiration for Project
Several academic libraries try to maintain subject specific blogs. These blogs may have links and information to websites and other general resources that may be valuable to students and faculty in a particular field as well as information that might pertain to a particular institution.
The problem with doing something like this is usually time. A single librarian usually does not have the time to look for and write about new resources in a particular field on a consistent enough basis to maintain a viable blog. This does not even consider the fact that most librarians have several fields in which they need to keep up. Once upon a time, I heard Pamela Bluh at the University of Maryland at Baltimore say that she did not understand why librarians from different institutions did not collaborate more often, and I started to think about how librarians might collaborate. I came upon the thought of a collaborative topic blog. One librarian may not have time to maintain a viable blog, but if as few as 4 librarians committed to one post a month, then you could get one entry per week. Now that may be viable.
Project Overview
What we propose to do is maintain one or more collaborative blogs on particular subjects. Each collaborative blog will consist of at least 4 librarians, each of whom will be responsible for making at least one blog post a month. That way the blog will be update at least 4x/month and without requiring too much of a commitment from any single librarian. Each participant should take a different week of the month (i.e someone might post on the 1st Mondayish of the month, the next on the 2nd Monday, the next on the 3rd, etc.) so that the entries are somewhat evenly spaced.
The blog will generate an RSS feed or atom feed which will enable to content of the blog to be inserted into mot web pages. So, any librarian could have the list of highlighted resources from this blog integrated into things like library subject guides and online courseware.
How this might be used
Here is an example of how the end result could look:
http://guides.temple.edu/content.php?pid=3845
In this example, the librarian has a page with business resources, and an rss feed with library news appears on the left. So, if the library news were replaced with the entries from the collobarative blog that might highlight new resources, then you would have it.
Other places the RSS feed could be used would be in a page set up for a specific course (assuming a professor is willing). The feed could also be placed in most courseware like Blackboard and Moodle. Also, libraries could create a mashup of this feed and a news feed that their own library may maintain to have the feed customized for their library and/or to highlight databases or resources their own library has purchased.
Customizing RSS for Individual Libraries
If your library has its own RSS feed it should be fairly simple to combine it with a topical RSS from this blog and display the results as one feed. There are ways to get javascript code that you can paste into a website to have the combined feed display on any page you want (assuming you have permission to upload the javascript code). Here are sites that can do this for free:
There are probably more.
If you need assistance with creating a combined feed and displaying on a page, you can contact Michael Shochet at the University of Baltimore, Langsdale Library. UB's email addresses for staff are first initial followed by last name (all lowercase and all one string) @ubalt.edu.
Examples of Entries
Entries will be mostly left up to the librarians who are participating. In general, each entry should be about something that is of current interest. This could be a relatively new website or a summary of a topic that is in the news with links of interest, a description of a significant article or maybe a new research tool of some sort. Most items should be related to the blog topic, but items of general interest to many students, professors, etc are welcome as well. In general, people should be encouraged to avoid focusing on articles that are only available in a paid database, as other campuses might not have access to it. However, I think some examples of some articles that may only be available as an abstract online should be OK. There may be some ways to generate an OpenURL link that might work across campuses.
Next Steps
- Find librarians who might be interested in participating
- Identify one or more subject areas in which to focus. This will depend largely on how many libraries are interested in participating and their particular subject interests
- Have librarians commit to posting at least one entry a month.
- Create the blog(s).
Future Steps Under Consideration
- Create javascript for the feed to make it relatively easy to cut and paste into a website
- Create widgets so people can put the feed onto iGoogle, Pageflakes, etc.
- Figure out how to track hits and get usage statistics
- Maybe do a presentation/poster session for MLA (other places?)
