I've now been blogging here (somewhat) consistently for 5 months, and I must admit, it is difficult to remain patient in the hopes of attracting an audience. It often feels like I am writing in a vacuum, frankly, because so few readers comment on this blog.
For those of you who do read the blog consistently, thank you. I do appreciate you. Please tell your friends.
Now please, tell me what I can do to bring in more readers. What features do you enjoy? What could you care less about? What would you like to see more of? What am I doing right?
If you yourself blog for your special collections library, what has been most successful in drawing readers? Inquiring minds want to know, especially since I'm trying at the moment to write a chapter about blogging in special collections for the book I'm co-authoring with Beth Whittaker at OSU. The chapter is stuck, frankly, because I'm finding very little success with this blog, and am still just beginning to examine other examples of successful special collections blogs that have an audience. If you know of examples, by all means, send them my way.
If you have more than 10 subscribers, tell me, what's your secret?
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
Why am I doing this, anyway?
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7 comments:
As a consumer and collections junkie, what makes me add the occasional library special collections blog to my feedreader is when they post images and background in relation to their own collections..mostly.
My faves (not all are of the type just mentioned though) are..
http://blogs.princeton.edu/graphicarts/
http://brblroom26.wordpress.com/
http://uoncc.wordpress.com/
http://www.library.uiuc.edu/blog/digitizedbotw/
http://gsaartdesign.blogspot.com/
I sympathise with your ruminations. I've kind of dreamed of having your role at times ... only to be followed by the realisation that being on the 'outside' broadens the canvas and eliminates editorial restrictions.
I'm not sure what advice to offer actually. There a quite a few similar sites out there that potter along in their own gardens happily, without seemingly worrying about building an audience or they have an adequate ready-made audience in-house.
I guess some jobs require it as a 'task' but it's hard to know just why you are seeking to widen your audience. Ego? Job requirement? Wanting to get NIU collections better known? (funnily enough the link to the collections - first one I clicked - was dead a little while ago ... I presume it's just a momentary thing). The answers to these and more questions might suggest way of achieving the audience goals, if you follow.
I suppose the answers are always fairly similar anyway though. Consistent and unique content. Care with links. Comment in simpatico sites with interesting info. One important thing which pertains to this site - my first visit (I think) - is staking out the field you wish to plough. My immediate impression is that this site is 'general' and therefore -- coupled with seeing boingboing mentioned twice in a quick scan. Heh. -- not going to entice me much. 'General' blogs are a dime a dozen and I may as well visit bboing (well, I secretly do when I get posted/cited there) every day instead of a bunch of 'general' sites. Content needs to good as well as fairly unique.
At any rate, you're welcome to email if you want my considered opinions. These are just drive-by thoughts.
But: PUT UP IMAGES: we are all time-sensitive multitasking media consumers so making eyeballs give more than a very cursory glance is important to my way of thinking.
Thanks! This is very helpful. The main problem has been that we don't have a departmental digital camera that was produced after 1995--the images that have been posted recently were taken using my personal camera. That should be remedied soon, and I'll be hoping to focus more on the books...
I came here from the link on librarian.net, and it looks like you have kept up the blog over the month between the time you wrote this post and the time Jessamyn linked here. And got go to dinner with Cory Doctorow, which is very cool.
This doesn't directly answer your question, but I think that casting this as the "NIU Special Collections Blog" might be working against you. I am interested in reading special collections bloggers, but the title makes me wonder if it would be too focused on local issues that I wouldn't really be interested in. Reading a few posts makes me think I will like the blog, but just going by the title, I might not have bothered.
Another thing that can't be helping is that the auto-detect feed that appears in the location bar for Firefox and similar browsers doesn't seem to work. The link that appears on the page in the sidebar seems to work fine, and I'm using that link to subscribe.
Huh. I'll see what I can do about the Firefox problem. Perhaps it has to do with submitting it to feedburner? I don't know.
I think that as time has gone on, I'm finding that people are far more interested in librarian blogs than library blogs. The blog was launched to promote my department, but it seems to be promoting me a bit more. Something to ponder...
Hey Lynne!
Are you going to be at RBMS this summer in Anaheim? I'm chairing a seminar about blogs and blogging, and my speakers include Nancy Kuhl who started many of the Beinecke blogs (including brblroom26 with fellow curator Tim Young), John Overholt (the Catablog blog), and Stephanie Horowitze from the Charles Babbage Institute's blog (which employs Meebo). The seminar is a blogging boot camp, and we're doing to discuss some best practices and tips for building a solid reader base, networking with other bloggers, unique uses of blogs in a special collection context, etc. We're looking forward to having other special collection bloggers in the audience participate, and perhaps the session would be good fodder for your chapter.
Nancy Kuhl and I have also written an article about the Beincke's first two blogs which might be somewhat helpful: Blogging at the Beinecke: Promoting Special Collections in the 21st Century.
Take care, and hope to see you this summer! (If you can't make it, I'm planning to-- of course-- mount all the materials from the seminar online for folks who couldn't attend.)
PS. Strong images, and limited blocks of text make for good posts in my humble opinion. I agree with previous poster peacay about... we are living in an increasingly visual world, and the power of images is absolutely essential. Also, participation in the blogosphere (i.e. commenting on other blogs, having guest bloggers, maintaining a dynamic blogroll) are all good things to keep in mind.
Oh, one more thing! Kathryn Greenhill at her blog Librarians Matter recently wrote a post that delineates 20 questions to answer about why one should continue or stop blogging.
I think some sort of self-reflection is definitely good practice to help one stay targeted, focused, and energized in any kind of blogging endeavor.
Kathleen,
I am indeed planning to be at RBMS, and specifically at your session, with bells on, as they say. I saw the 20 questions entry, and I'm going to pop over to your article this morning. Beth Whittaker and I are working on a survey that we hope to promote at RBMS, that will take the temperature of the field in general with 2.0 technologies, just to see where we're at, with the results to come out in our book.
I've just begun commenting on other library blogs, which, predictably, has resulted in a minor spike in traffic here. :-)And of course, I should thank Jessamyn for pointing to me from librarian.net.
I think the real lesson I'm learning here is patience, and giving myself space to figure out what my version of a departmental blog looks like.
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