today was
gleeson library's "town hall meeting," an all-hands-on-deck meeting for USF librarians and library staff, and i was invited to be the speaker. the title and topic of my talk was "blogging."
i began by showing the
NSUBA Library Blog, a blog for northeastern state university's broken arrow library (that i learned about via
linda summers' poster session at last week's
OK-ACRL). wordpress + images of the library and people in the library + brief posts that educate readers about the library's offerings = a smart library blog. i mentioned the magic of comments, the importance of tags, and the possibilities of group blogs.
then i temporarily moved away from libraries and talked about blogs across USF. i talked about father privett's blog,
USF 2028, and encouraged more people to comment on it. i mentioned the
USF journalism blog, an online forum to bring together past and present USF journalism students to discuss the morphing landscape of the beast we call journalism. i mentioned what a pleasure it is to read the blogs of my colleagues and friends -
michael robertson and
andrew goodwin. i think i turned to the librarians and said something like, "i don't know if you all want to know more about what your colleagues think and do but i get a real kick out of keeping up with michael and andrew through their blogs." i said this because a) it's true and b) i wanted them to imagine the ways that a gleeson group blog could be good not only for USF students and faculty but also, and i think more importantly, for USF librarians.
then i returned to the library, to
get graphic, a past gleeson library book display that i have used countless times to illustrate the concept of
harnessing collective intelligence. it was a treat to talk about a library book display to an audience that included the two librarians who designed it - kathy woo and debbie benrubi. i concluded the talk by saying that a display like get graphic requires real work, real time, and real resources. blogging about it, however, is sort of easy. snap some digital photographs of the display, snag some of the words used in the display's handouts, and include some hyperlinks to display-related library resources, and viola: a blog post.
excellent refreshments and conversations followed. thank you gleeson library.
enjoy. there's more where that came from.
