246 - Week 03 Blogging & Marketing - Exercise 2

246 - Week 03 Blogging & Marketing - Exercise 2 

1. What do you see as the differences between the five blogs I asked you to subscribe to in terms of the type of blog and type of post (genre, length, etc.).

Having to find difference between the 5 blogs written by people who work for and love libraries is a challenging task. Of course, as they all focus on issues in libraries and their own place within librarianship, they have much more to compare than to contrast.  “In the Library...” blog stood apart from the others due to its long, multi-authored, peer-reviewed essay posts.  This site uses blogging as an academic activity, which is certainly not the norm.  The other blogs are written in first person singular tense, are more personal and casual in tone, and reflect opinion and observation over fact and research.  Also, these blogs feature posts that could be read easily in a minute or two, and they feature information that is helpful or informative.

2. What types of posts do you find most appealing to read and why?

As a person who’s regularly paging through RSS feeds, I’ve learned to discriminate somewhat between blogs worth my time, and those that don’t make the cut.  As mentioned in my blog post on this week’s theme of blogging & marketing, if a blog/feed is not updated regularly, I delete it.  This is one of the easy ways for me to judge if blog is worth subscribing to. (I may change this criteria someday...considering I have 154 blog subscriptions, I may later decide that fewer posts better suits my ability to read them!)

I like well written blogs with pretty pictures, too.  Blogs that seem to be quick thoughts about something the author means to think about more but hasn’t had time so he’s just going to post his underdeveloped philosophy online...no thank you.  (And because I feel that’s how I come across when I blog, I do not blog...except when required to by class exercises. :)

When it comes to library blogs specifically, I have a hard time discriminating between feeds when they all seem to contain information that could help me learn and grow and understand librarianship better and help me in my current job.  But I have to.   Perhaps the best criteria for me currently is to choose blogs that I enjoy most, because I will be most likely to read well-written, funny, relevant and SHORT posts.  After all, I work full time in a library system and take 2 SLIS classes a semester.  That’s a lot of library information for me to percolate before you factor in RSS feeds.  Nevertheless, I don’t want to get so caught up in my perspective on the library world that I forget what the broader issues are.

3. What three library blogs did you subscribe to?
Please include a 1-3 sentence description of each one.

In addition to the 5 blogs given to us to subscribe to, I chose to add the following blogs to my collection:

The Ann Arbor District Library AXIS blog posts events and succinctly describes the event, along with the date, time and age group for the event.  I’ve read about Ann Arbor’s gaming initiatives in other classes, and I love reading about their programming in such a concise template!

The University of Victoria (UVic) Library has a “Featured Resources” blog which lets patrons know what’s new and noteworthy in the library.  I like seeing academic universities reach out/outreach to their clients via blogging because it certainly softens up the library’s image and makes it seems as if librarians care for their university community.  

And the SJSU Art Librarian blog caught my eye because it involves my current school, art, and librarianship, and I found that combo too tantalizing to pass up!  Although the blog hasn’t been updated since June 27, I think I might hang onto this blog with the hopes the librarian begins to post more regularly.  I like her posts on art books she’s reading and their subject headings!  She also captivated me with her talk on what to see in San Jose when you come to town for graduation.  That will be me next spring!  Maybe she’ll let me know what art shows to see next May!

4. Based on the blogs you chose, what are some of the characteristics that you think make a library blog successful?

I think good, concise, clever writing does a lot to hook me, and a good picture makes a blog on a relevant topic hard to resist.  Long blog posts are very much a turn-off, no matter how well written, because I feel that they take too much of my time...although I must take a closer look at the “In the Library with a Lead Pipe” blog as it seems to have a great premise--and it’s peer-reviewed.  Maybe I should make time for it!  Also, if blog posts on library topics are too short, they can’t be giving me much information I couldn’t come up with myself (I say to myself as I gloss over its entries).  So too short or too long or poorly written/constructed/presented/thought-out blogs....no thank you!  You’ll really keep my attention with pictures, medium-sized, regular posts with clever turns of phrase!