Creating and maintaining a blog - and - the Archives Hub experience Jane Stevenson & Amanda Hill

What is a blog?  Short for Weblog  Diary-type commentary  Individual / topic based  Personal reflections, news, events, reviews, analysis  Typical blog: text, images, comments, archive, links to other related sites, feed  Part of Web 2.0 – social, collaborative

First thoughts  It is easy to set a blog up… but:  What is its purpose?  What are the advantages of doing it?  Will you make regular entries?  Over 70 million blogs; large number not used

Why create a blog?  Raise awareness  Build connections  Articulate your thoughts  Enable feedback (comment)  An accessible means of communication that takes very little time to set up  Keep in tune with current technologies

Why not create a blog  Nobody will read it…?  Pressure to blog  Need to keep up with…everything  Danger of indiscretion  Other avenues of communication are more effective  Better not to have a blog than one you hardly use

Blog approaches  Formal –repository news; organised events; announcements; critique  Informal –general news; comments; anecdotes; humour; discussion; personal experiences; raise ideas

Setting up a blog  Easy to create, edit and publish  Use of blog hosting service  Keep blog files on own system (FTP)  Maintenance usually through browser- based interface  Set up: register; choose template; a few settings…that’s about it for a basic blog  Proofread, spell check, cite sources, add plenty of links

Blogs and RSS  RSS/Atom feed for your blog  Syndication (process)  RSS/Atom (technology)  Feed readers display new posts  New items automatically discovered and downloaded  Many feed readers (Netvibes)

Maintaining a blog  Group blog (works well with more informal blog)  Guest bloggers  Blog entries that encourage comments (may increase motivation!)  Visit and comment on other blogs  Check reactions to your blog (Technorati)

Archives Hub Blog

Why?  Part of Hub mission is to act as a centre of expertise on electronic cataloguing  Pride ourselves on being quick to react to new developments in technology within the service  Means we keep an eye on interoperability issues, new reports etc.  Mechanism for updating each other and Hub contributors on items of interest

How?  Set up blog using Blogger in February 2006  Very easy to do  Blogger offers option of hosting blog on our own website: –

What happened next…  Experimental service  Announcements about Hub developments  Reports on conferences attended, reviews of publications  Special features

Benefits  Helps to build team spirit – a joint effort  RSS/Atom feeds of posts come as standard – content can be presented in ways that best suit the users  Sometimes get conversations going

More benefits  Raises awareness of Archives Hub beyond our usual constituency  Starts up new dialogues  Makes us more thoughtful about what we’re doing and why

Own hosting has some issues

Control freakery  See who is linking to your blog  See how authoritative your blog is  Even see how much it’s worth!