[Publib] Library Book Blog

[K.G. Schneider]

We recently started several blogs at our library, one of which is a book
blog (www.madisonpubliclibrary.org/madreads).  Each day a review is posted,
written by one of the staff.  We get comments only occasionally, but I think
that's the nature of most blogs - unless they're controversial.  People are
reading the blog.  I can tell that because for every book reviewed, there
are a few holds placed after the review appears.  

Another example of people lurking was with our What's New blog
(www.madisonpubliclibrary.org/new).  On that one there are almost never any
comments, but when we recently posted about increased hours at a couple of
the branches, a dozen different people commented about the change.  They're
out there, they just wait until they feel strongly about what you've said
before they'll post a comment.  Sort of like everything else we do. <g>

—-

(Nice blogs!) Depending on how you have it hosted, the ISP for your blog may
offer tools for tracking activity. For my personal blog, I track page
requests. For my organizational newsfeed, LII.org What's New This Week, I
track how many hits we get to the RSS feed file. We have repeatedly tuned
that file to get fewer hits, and yet it keeps going and going... 

If you use Feedburner to host your RSS feed, you will get some subscriber
statistics. However, feed subscriptions are not the same as blog readership.
For both my personal and organizational blog, I track how many people are
subscribed through Bloglines. That's a very coarse measurement, however,
that only tells you subscribership through one service, and doesn't account
for the overall increase in traffic to your blog over time, assuming you
have good stuff. (Also, a blog may have multiple feeds—my personal blog has
five—so you need to track *every* feed to get a reasonable count.) An entry
you do on a book today may suddenly become hot months or years down the
road, and people will find it through Google and similar discovery tools. 

My observation from my personal blog and from my wider experience in the
biblioblogosphere and beyond is that people *love* book blogs, and that book
blogging is a very natural service area for librarians. In the general blog
world, I personally read Galleycat, Maud Newton, A Critical Mass, if:book,
The Elegant Variation, top news from Editor and Publisher, and others. One
way to increase traffic to your blog is to link to popular discussions on
the big book blogs. People—including YOUR people—will find you. 

I have also noted a spike whenever I review a book on my personal blog...
and as I wrote in a LITA post, people assume librarians of any stripe are
trustworthy sources about books:

http://litablog.org/2006/06/26/the-ala-cone-of-confusion/ 

I'd love to see more examples of library blogs, including book blogs,
discussed on PUBLIB. They are such a good way to capture something we do so
well as librarians—-add value to the information experience—-while
leveraging the public's trust in us.  

Karen G. Schneider
kgs at bluehighways.com