Proposal prepared by: Stephanie Farrar, Angelique Mullen, Lana Fukshima, and Ananya Dattagupta
Introduction
The Crestwood Public Library staff would like to implement a blog for the library on Blogger.com. Derived from the term “weblog,” which means to keep a log on a website, a blog is a web page consisting of a series of posts or written updates. Displayed as individual entries, the posts are commonly arranged in reverse chronological order. Blogs often have a section below each post where readers can comment on the topic and participate in discussions if the blog owner enables this feature.
The Crestwood Public Library is located in the heart of a medium sized town with a population consisting mainly of families with children. The local elementary school is near the library, and many parents and children visit the library in the afternoons. While the Crestwood Public Library has a strong collection geared for children in elementary school, the library does not provide any service that offers parents guidance in assisting their children with appropriate reading selections.
By implementing a blog designed as a place for parents to read book reviews and suggestions for elementary reading materials, the Crestwood Public Library seeks to provide a large portion of the population with a reliable resource when seeking assistance in finding good books for children between the ages of five and eight. Through comments and discussions that will be enabled on the blog, parents will also be able to form a community and connect with each other on new levels. They will be encouraged to share thoughts and opinions based on the books, stories, themes and personal experiences with reading and with early elementary students.
This service will primarily help patrons in the book selection process, but it will also benefit library staff, since the blog will raise awareness of reading materials and offer insight a librarian may not be able to include in a face to face encounter.
Examples of Other Library Blogs
The following are examples of library blogs that offer reader’s advisory for children. They offer the best in practice for youth advisory blogs, and are similar to what is proposed for Crestwood Library’s new blog:
Canton Public Library: Kids Blog
One of several blogs by this public library in Canton, Mississippi, the Kids page has many resources for children. There are Reader’s Advisory links, as well as informational posts for parents about topics related to early literacy. Other posts include programming notes, song links, videos, and community information related to kids.
Kalamazoo Public Library: Parenting and Kids Blog
Updated at least once a month but often weekly, this blog features programming notes about events for children at the Kalamazoo Public Library in Michigan. Each post is also tagged with folksonomic terms so that patrons can easily search the blog for books, materials, movies, or other literacy-related topics.
San Mateo County Library: Kids’s Voices
This fabulous blog has many authors who are all librarians at the various branches of the San Mateo County Library system. Updated every few days, most of the posts are information posts with Reader’s Advisory suggested centered on a particular theme. This reader’s advisory blog is fully integrated with the library’s main kid page, allowing the visitor to access games, books, and information for parents and teachers.
Wake County Public Libraries: The Kids’ Bookshelf
This blog is a fabulous Reader’s Advisory page that is updated several times a week. Together with the main children’s page, the website creates a seamless experience for the visitor, combining community and the library. On the Reader’s Advisory page, there are book suggestions for all ages and in all genres, along with a handy tag cloud to access tagged posts of a certain topic. On the children’s page, there are links to book clubs, book reviews, websites, and other library services.
Possible Roadblocks to Implementation
While the Crestwood Public Library community and staff are open to new technologies being implemented in the library, there are still several roadblocks that could prevent immediate success of the blog. Most of the staff members are knowledgeable about blogs, but often organizations fail to incorporate the right approach in their entries, and one area of concern involves the possibility of falling short of publishing original, quality content on a consistent and regular basis. Also, the extended time commitment required of staff may cause difficulties completing all the tasks. This could lead to a failure to value quality readership, which is another serious roadblock often overlooked when measuring the success of organizational blogs. Finally, lack of effective marketing of the blog in the online community in order to draw a continuous flow of dedicated audience members is one of the major factors that could hinder the successful implementation of the blog.
The Crestwood Public Library children’s book review blog will take all these issues as mentioned above into serious consideration and continue in their endeavor to create and maintain a blog that will successfully cater to the information need of the community. The staff responsible for maintaining the blog will conduct an extensive evaluation of all the possible blogging techniques in order to publish interesting and unique material, then they will employ the one that best serves the purpose and needs of the blog. The staff will be aware of the fact that creating unique and original postings while maintaining consistency and regularity is of paramount importance and crucial to the success of the book review blog. Reviews will be regularly posted along with graphics, and each entry will include the age level for the book and publishing information. Also, the Crestwood Public Library children’s book review blog will be an open-comment blog. This will encourage two way communication between the library and parents. It engages and invites people to participate directly by posting in the comment box, thus making the blog a place of happening, giving users a reason to come back for more. Staff members will develop a schedule and set aside time to post and review blog comments so that readership is valued and users receive responses within an appropriate amount of time.
In addition to publishing original material and valuing readership, the staff will also put in considerable effort to market the blog effectively and make it well known in the community. Marketing efforts will be geared both in-house and in online settings. In-house efforts will include incorporating the blog address on general brochures and fliers provided by the youth services department. The youth services department librarians will also promote the blog through word of mouth during story time, reference interviews, and reader advisory interactions with parents and caretakers. Online efforts include posting links to the blog through the library’s existing online presence which consists of their website, Facebook, and Twitter accounts. Also, adding highly searched keywords to the book reviews will increase the traffic flow in the blog. Crestwood Public Library staff responsible for the blog will meticulously choose the popular keywords that will make the blog visible to the searchers looking for quality reviews of children’s books.
Software Implementation Suggestions
There are many options to choose from in terms of blogging software. The Crestwood Public Library chose to make use of Google’s Blogger for the blog software simply because it is not only free, but also popular, easily accessible, and just as easily utilized. Some other popular free blogging sites include Wordpress and Tumblr.
Maintenance Plan
In terms of maintenance, the Crestwood Public Library youth services librarian staff will be writing and posting content into the blog. Each youth services librarian staff will be on a set rotation, taking turns at least once a week to post a book review on the blog site. The librarians will have the option for their blog postings to be reviewed amongst themselves for feedback before being officially posted to the public online. Whenever new youth services librarian staff are hired, blog training will be included with the other types of general training provided to new hires. Although the actual content of each blog post will be at the discretion of the librarian writing the entry, some general guidelines will be established to encourage a cohesive voice as an institution. The overall style of writing will be kept professional but casual, friendly, and inviting. Each posting will be a maximum of approximately 300 words in length, include short bibliographic information and a small image of the book cover, be tagged with the category or genre of the book, and titled with the name of the book being reviewed. The librarian on duty for writing a blog posting for the week will also be held responsible for responding to any questions or comments made through the site during that time frame.
Assessment
To make sure the blog has the desired impact on children and their families, the Crestwood library staff will use several measures of assessment. First, staff members will view statistics available in Blogger to see how many visitors the blog gets every week and to track the number of unique visitors to the site. This could possibly be a measure of interest in the site. Staff will also review the open-ended comments, and they may even quantify them if there is a large number.
Other assessment measures will include tracking the circulation records of the materials suggested on the site to see if there are any increases. Attendance at programming events will also be monitored, to see if there is any increase in numbers resulting from the influence of the blog.
A final measure wil be an annual user survey and needs assessment that patrons are given. There, questions will be asked about the blog and feedback will be provided from regular library users. Librarians and staff will also get verbal feedback from patrons and visitors on an informal basis.
Prototype: http://crestwoodpubliclibrary.blogspot.com/
