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–

Greetings from NYC!
Enjoyed your presentation! How many of your faculty respondents were adjuncts vs. full time?

Brian

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–

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.

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!

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