Alone and Unobserved

At the request of my friend and coworker Tania, this morning I taught an hour-long workshop on Blogging in Libraries to about ten librarians from all over the country.

Let’s be honest. I’ve kept this personal blog for three years now, but I’ve never written professionally and I certainly haven’t ever taken part of an official library blog. The library I work for doesn’t even have any blogs (yet). Due to the underlying database construction, our website doesn’t have any place a blog could be hosted.

And yet, I taught a roomful of people how useful blogs are to libraries. I debated the merits of self-hosted WordPress vs. self-hosted Drupal (neither of which I’ve ever used) and talked about using a blog to add instant RSS/Atom feed functionality to a library webpage. And I think it went okay. Some of the participants were disappointed, I think, that I focused more on online blogging services like Blogger and WordPress.com (we spent half of the hour setting up our own WordPress accounts, creating a personal blog, writing a blog post and commenting on someone else’s post) than on fancy, customized, seamlessly integrated, self-hosted options. But I was told to gear the presentation towards people who had never blogged before, and I don’t think there’s any question about it: online blogging is the right first step for a beginner. Besides, I don’t think the library IT department would have been amused if I had tried to demonstrate installing Drupal on the library computers.

If you want to see a truly amazing library website, check out the page for the Topeka & Shawnee County Library. It’s basically a series of interconnected blogs, heavily updated, on all kinds of topics. Teen services, events, new acquisitions . . . it’s pretty cool.

You can view the presentation I used—along with the speaker’s notes, if you have a Google Account—on Google Docs. Thanks to Tania for inviting me to do this! Now that I’ve had time to think about it, I’ve decided I enjoyed myself.