Subject Librarian 2.0?
Subject Librarian 2.0? ‘The Song Remains the Same,’ It’s Just a Cover Song Using New Instruments
Kris Johnson
Information Literacy/Instruction Librarian
Meriam Library, California State University, Chico
http://www.csuchico.edu/~johnson/index.html
Introduction:
Hear my song
Yeah…people don’t you listen now? sing along!
Oh, you don’t know what you’re missing now.
(Led Zeppelin, ‘The Song Remains the Same’)
Have your library constituents heard your song, and do they ever sing along? This presentation will focus on one librarian’s practical use of blogs in an effort to convey her philosophy that regardless of the technical aspects of the changing information landscape (Library 2.0?), the song, generally, remains the same when it comes to the messages subject librarians need to convey.
Academic libraries, today more than ever, are an essential resource in the never ending quest between people and their desire to get in touch with the information they need. Academic libraries have so much they try to communication to their constituents, but are the constituents listening, or are they missing the messages? The tools librarians have at their disposal to communicate with are more varied and techno-focused than ever, but the actual messages have generally remained the same. For a subject librarian in academe, those messages generally involve describing new resources, announcing up-coming events, explaining trends, detailing services, and much more. So what’s the best tool to get that message out? E-mail? Wiki’s? Podcasts? Good old fashioned, print-based newsletter?
Blogs are a quick and efficient tool librarians can use to communicate their messages. Better yet, Blogging technology allows for the potential for library constituents to become more involved in the dialog, to sing along! The minimum skills necessary for a librarian to utilize a blog as a communication tool are a natural curiosity, an openness to learn new (sometimes goofy sounding) terminology, a small amount of courage to experiment with pre-packaged, free blog software, ideas, and a computer.
Using lyrics from the Led Zeppelin song “The Song Remains the Same” literally, and as a metaphor, this presentation will describe one librarian’s fledgling journey using Blogs as a means to connect with users in a variety of academic subject disciplines. The presentation will discuss choices made (software, frequency of postings, subject matter and length, etc.), whether those choices seem to have made any sort of impact, and if so, will give examples of some instances in which some type of impact was noted.
Watch the screencasts: Part 1 and Part 2.
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Tags: Blogging, library, libraries, higheredblogcon
April 10th, 2006 at 6:18 pm
Kris, The points that you are making are all very informative and useful for us to implement. Right from announcing new books in the library to letting faculty and students know about a library event or a library workshop- a blog can be an effective information resource for all. Having an RSS feed from a blog is important since having subscribed to the feeds, library users can keep uptodate with the blog. What I would like to explore is:
1. How do we assess whether our faculty and students are using our blog? Is it worth spending the time? How do we know that whether faculty and students are subscribing to RSS feeds?
2. In what ways the faculty members collaborate with the librarians and use their blogs in teaching? Jay
April 10th, 2006 at 7:07 pm
Hi Jay,
Thanks for watching the presentation and for your comments.
Regarding your first question on assessment: Assessment can be difficult. Sometimes we have to go with our gut feelings. Sometimes we can attempt to get more valid information through formalized assessment methods. I was trying to get a ‘piece’ of the assessment picture via my SurveyMonkey.com survey. The survey data combined with my gut feelings tells me that, overall, the blogs seem to be a good communication vehicle. As for the time spent assessing, I wouldn’t devote a great amount of time trying to find out whether faculty are reading my blogs. I think one survey once per year would be all I do. Students aren’t my primary audience, although I’m hoping some faculty will use the blog info and pass it along to their students.
As for your second question regarding how faculty can collaborate with librarians to use the blogs in teaching, that might be something I can explore this next year. I don’t have any concrete ideas about this collaboration right now, but sometimes we find ways to collaborate through serendipidity and perhaps that will happen for me this year!
There were a few serindipitous interactions that occured because of various blog postings that I didn’t have time to include in the presentation. Perhaps in the future I can put together a “cause & effect” type of presentation that lists some positive, serindipitous outcomes from the blog. Stay tuned! And in you have any ideas for faculty/librarian collaboration via blogs please feel free to share them with all of us here at the conference!
April 11th, 2006 at 10:35 pm
Kris, I enjoyed your presentation. At my library at Colorado College, we have used blogs for several purposes, but not for the kind of faculty outreach you describe. We have talked about it, but never really got it going. I’m going to try and get something up over the summer similar to your model, and see how it goes next year.
I laughed out loud when you mentioned your trouble getting through Walt Crawford’s “Library 2.0 or ‘Library 2.0′” article. When I wrote up my reaction to that article I said that reading it was a “slog”; Crawford left a comment saying that “slog” was a kind word for it, and said that it was an even bigger slog to write.
As for Jay’s question #1 above regarding monitoring and measuring blog readership, I use free services from StatCounter.com and FeedBurner.com to monitor my visitor statistics and RSS feed subscribership respectively. They aren’t perfect, but they let me know what kind of traffic I’m getting, and where it is coming from.
April 12th, 2006 at 12:13 pm
Hi Steve,
Thanks for watching the presentation and your kind comments. I’ll check out Stat Counter.com and FeedBurner.com. Thanks for those tips. Do you know if these counters can be hidden? I don’t really think I need to have a publically viewable counter…my readerships is just not going to be that large due to the specialized nature of the blogs, but having a hidden counter would be helpful to be as administrator.
I encourage you to try using blogs for faculty outreach. I’ve found the process to be very easy, and in addition to being informational for faculty, I find that it is informational for myself. The process of finding a topic and writing about it is a learning experience, and I find myself referring back to posts occasionally while helping a faculty or student with a reference question. I’ve said this in previous comments I’ve made on this conference website, but I’ll say it again: the opportunities for serendipitious results are endless!
–Kris–
May 3rd, 2006 at 1:58 pm
Hi Kris,
Greetings from NYC!
Enjoyed your presentation! How many of your faculty respondents were adjuncts vs. full time?
Brian
May 9th, 2006 at 7:03 pm
Hey Brian! We miss you here in CA. Hope you’re loving it back East.
As to how many of my survey respondents were adjuncts vs. full-time, I actually don’t know. I didn’t collect any demographic info via the survey. We do have 55% full-time faculty and 52% part-time faculty on our campus, but it would be speculation on my part as to who actually responded.
–Kris–