Journal Article # 2 - Jennifer S.

Horwath Jenn. Dr. Bloglove or: How I Stopped Worrying and Love the Blog. Feliciter; 2006: 66-68.

A persistent link to this article can be found at:
http://search.epnet.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&an=20673322


Creating a blog that captivates its audience is a great way to expose the tremendous skills and expertise librarians have and advertise their services. Ultimately a blog will excite the users and community about the process of discovering information. Because so, this article begins by posing two questions: how do small libraries (public, school, or academic) without a strong IT department participate in blogging and, secondly, once a library creates a blog how do they ensure their patrons continuously return to it? Jenn Horwath, the blogging eLibrarian at the Library @ Mohawk College in Ontario, suggests the following:

1. Determine the mission and purpose of the project and who the target audience will be.

2. Use other blogs to find content and news that will assist your patrons. Horwath suggests:
Gary Price's ResourceShelf http://www.resourceshelf.com/,
Paul R. Pival's Distant Librarian http://distlib.blogs.com/, and
Jenny Levine's The Shifted Librarian http://www.theshiftedlibrarian.com/.

3. Create in-house tutorials to link to the blog in order for it to become a one-stop-shopping site for patrons.

4. Due to busy schedules, no need to publish more than bi-monthly. This way you "let the service drive the technology, rather than the other way around" (67).

6. Make it fun!

The BrainBlog from the Library @ Mohawk College won the CTCL Innovation Achievement Award in 2005 (http://mohawklrc2.blogspot.com/). It is a very useful blog with a simple design. The other blogs that Howarth suggests are directed toward public and academic libraries. I find the information interesting but a little too advanced for my patrons. I read them to gather information that will help me as a professional. I find blogs for high school libraries to be very useful in gathering ideas for my new blog. The amazing Joyce Valenza’s blog (http://joycevalenza.edublogs.org/) has great tutorials on how to use Google, how to create a thesis, and how to use an online database, just to name a few. Check them out to see a large hotdog learning how to do an advanced search on Google….very funny!