Blogs
What are they? 

Blogs, or more formally, web logs, are periodically updated websites where an author writes about topics of personal interest. There are three aspects of blogs, frequency, brevity and personality. The tools made available through mass media companies’ websites have greatly reduced the amount of work involved in creating and maintaining a blog and consequently have made blogging a mass cultural phenomenon. Supposedly a layperson can set up a blog in five minutes and the hardest work seems to be picking a style template. Blogs consistently feature headlines, permanent links, topics, a search feature within the blog and archives. In terms of editorial content, blogs recognize that their writers are being wholly subjective and are expressing their opinions.

How are they used in libraries?

Certain librarians have taken the bit in their mouths in using blogs as a means of publicizing library new acquisitions and social events. Libraries also have organizational blogs, internal communication forums at an informal level, usually contained within a firewall and segregated from public view.

In the realm of public blogs, public libraries have been energizing their communities and expanding interest in their collections.

Here in Tucson, Pima County Public Library staffer Karen Greene, an acquaintance of this author, really took a lot of initiative in using blogs and other social media as a huge method of publicizing library acquisitions as well as opening up the blog to other embryonic uses of web 2.0 to publicize libraries, including user authored reviews in the style of the Amazon.com customer reviews of books, then energizing folks whose recent contact and involvement with libraries by hosting new and topical events at the PCPL like the series of “Makers” events. This has used a new widespread interest in crafts as an opportunity to organize and host craft-related events at various locations in the PCPL. Although most people notice the rise of the web has given rise to a boatload of digital gaming and other computer related hobbies, it has also revitalized tons of more traditional analog hobbies as hobbyists are able to share their progress and challenges as well as finished projects with their own blogs. One PCPL Makers event focused on knitting, another on Japanese animated Sci-Fi (“animé”) and affiliated hobbies (cartooning, creating costumes based on anime characters, building models of the robots or spaceships, creating original comics) and another for amateur musicians. This author was present at the anime-fest in late July of 2013 and had never seen so many adolescents and young adults at a library event in his life. Although this author was disappointed that there was no Makers event involving a specific red wax-sealed brand of bourbon.

Karen Greene left PCPL for greener pastures, but her idea for a library public blog has split into six separate library blogs, which can be viewed here:

http://www.library.pima.gov/contact/social.php#blogs

What is the expected social impact of this technology?

As seen with the “Makers” events above, blogs have gone far beyond the geeky stereotype of being some kind of online fanzine about the online world and has really invigorated all kinds of non-digital activities, or as Trevor Smith said, "Internet that's about the internet." In terms of libraries, it has created more outreach than any mailed out newsletter can possibly do and has brought more and more people into libraries wishing to check out materials on their widely varied interests. I would think that a library blog would get a lot more response than just a printed library newsletter, as it would be immediate and it is more actively read than a print newsletter. I think public blogs done by the right librarians would attract a lot of patrons to come to the library to check out new acquisitions.