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    Blogging 101

    Susan Herzog
    Eastern Connecticut State University
    http://susan-blog.blogspot.com/

    Are you looking for quick, easy and affordable vehicles to market academic library services? Do you need to publicize new databases, new books and media, or information literacy instruction? Don’t know HTML or don’t have the time or skills to create web pages? Blogging is rapidly becoming a new PR tool for the savvy 21st Century academic librarian.

    Without knowing any HTML, you can create instant web content in a matter of minutes. If there’s an issue regarding posting your blog on your library/university web server, there are sites which will host your blog for free. Blogging software is free or inexpensive, and easy to learn, and there is a rapidly expanding academic library weblog community where you can keep current, be inspired and ask questions.

    Blogs are exceptionally good for collaboration so multiple librarians can post to a New Books & Media Blog; blogs can also be used as an Intranet.

    This overview of blogging in the academic library will include:

    • What is blogging?
    • Why would I want to create a blog?
    • What decisions are necessary to make prior to creating a blog?
    • Participants will view (via screenshots and annotated links) a wide variety of academic library blogs
    • Participants will learn the steps to easily set up their own blog.
    • This presentation blog contains links to key blogging services and tools.

    Link to the presentation.

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    This entry was posted on Sunday, April 9th, 2006 at 11:17 pm and is filed under library & info resources. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

    4 Responses to “Blogging 101”

    Jay Bhatt Says:
    April 10th, 2006 at 7:57 pm

    Susan,

    Very comprehensive and detailed compilation on variety of ways a blog can be used in academic libraries. I would also like to add that a searchable blog can retrieve previous entries as well. This immensely helps when a student asks a question and you know that an entry related to that question was posted on the blog. One of the ways I am promoting my blog is by incorporating it in my library instruction class. I invite students to subscribe to the RSS feeds of my blog. All the resources we post on a blog are archived and can be easily accessed whenever needed. Most importantly, I learnt about new RSS feeds from electronic databases and electronic journals- just because I wanted to announce them myself on my blog and teach my students about them in the process. Jay

    Dan Karleen Says:
    April 10th, 2006 at 9:49 pm

    Interesting comments, Jay. Would you mind posting some of the links you mention?

    Susan Herzog Says:
    April 11th, 2006 at 6:47 am

    Thanks Jay! Great ideas. Most of my blogs have been from Blogger and I could never get the built-in search function to work. Any suggestions?

    I’ll check out your blog and get back to you.

    Jay Bhatt Says:
    April 11th, 2006 at 3:32 pm

    Hi,
    This is great. I am really enjoying this. New ideas, importantly, sharing among ourselves is so nice.

    A several times students have asked me what ASME journals are available. I email them with a link
    http://englibrary.blogspot.com/2006/03/new-asme-journals-activated.html and a brief information. They can access those titles from this link. The information tip included also shows how to access ASME titles from the library’s main database page.
    Many new engineering students ask about where to start with their research. I point to our new page ‘Fundamentals of Engineering Research’ at http://englibrary.blogspot.com/2006/03/fundamentals-of-engineering-research.html

    More about this during my presentation. I will introduce some new blog sites from our library as well. Jay