Research into how academics use blogs

Adventures in digital academia

Could be a useful resource when discussing web2.0, professional identities and open publising with academics.

Mothballing the SM@LL project

Just in case you missed the earlier posts here and on the ScienceLeicester blogs, I’ve just posted about the feedback we had for the SM@LL project from the funders.  For now, any future discussions about similar projects will be over on this blog - so leave us in your RSS feeds folks!

Blog stats

It’s been a while since I did one of these, but following last month’s news I thought it might be interesting to see how the traffic to this blog is doing.

Month	Hits	%age increase
July 09	195	N/a
Aug 08	144	-26%
Sept 08	276	+92%
Oct 08	145	-48%
Nov 08	406	+179%
Dec 08	653	+61%
Jan 09	745	+14%
Feb 09	820	+10%
Mar 09	1086	+24%
Apr 09	1189	+9%

Obviously these are non-disambiguated, and for all we know are the same person or crawler.  But as a useful guide to the hit-rate for this site I wonder how they stack up against the library pages, and perhaps more importantly for the future – against the SM@LL site?

Talking about my blog regeneration

I have just returned from the outer limits of the 2nd floor, where I’ve been having a lively discussion with Stu Johnson and colleague Marta about blogging.  Stu tells me that he’s been very impressed with the UoL Library blog and what we’ve been doing with it, which is really great to hear.  As regular readers know I’m a big advocate of blogs as knowledge based resources and communication channels within organisations (as well as without); so I’m delighted our own little corner of the blogosphere has encouraged some other people to have a go.

It is interesting that a lot of the challenges we faced in setting up and populating this blog are uppermost in the their minds as well; getting content, ensuring engagement from staff, coherent voice and privacy issues.  From what I heard they’re well on their way to creating a first class blog for their staff to share experience and learn from; so I wish them well.  I’ll look forward to reading it (if and when they allow public visitors).

I think my one regret from the meeting is that once again I don’t have anything especially exciting top blog about at this point; but perhaps we should be grateful I’m not writing about digital preservation and curation again!

An author’s guide to blogging – some help & guidance

As noted earlier we pioneering 4 wanted to expand out our test community to include a few more people, and hopefully by now you’ve had a chance to read the various emails I’ve sent out about it.

One thing we didn’t cover in the emails were any house rules and regulations for authors and commentors.  This blog is very much an informal knowledge exchange tool, which means we try to keep the tone light, informative and professional. It isn’t an appropriate place to air any inflammatory issues; rather it is a space to seek comment and input to areas you’re working on or to share/reflect on your own experiences. It is also a useful place to post links to articles or reports that are of interest to the library community.  We 4 have certainly learned quite a bit over the past couple of months already.

If you’ve never written for or read a blog before, we’d recommend following some of the links in the Blogroll(on the left) to see the tone and style adopted by other academic bloggers.  It might be that you’re actually a long time blogger with a different hat on (personally I’m into my 5th year of blogging now), in which case the four of us would like to invite you to start contributing sooner rather than later.  Don’t be afraid – no one is going to call you stupid!

I’ll leave you with Johnson’s good blogging conduct rules of thumb, which I’ll expect you all to inwardly digest and be able to quote from heart by next month:

• Keep posts/comments short, light and readable (yes this post probably fails that test)
• Don’t stress over the grammar – better out than in!
• If you think it’s interesting, chances are someone else on staff does too and will benefit from it.
• Add tags freely and plentiful – use categories sparingly (and please ask if you want to add more categories!)
• Try and blog at least twice a month if not more – the more voices the blog has the more valuable and enjoyable it will be
• Try and comment on at least one post a week – I will be keeping score.
• There is no such thing as a bad post…(well almost)
• If you’re unsure about anything- just ask me, Keith, Selina or Sarah
• AND remember: anyone in the world could read your post/comment…so never blog anything you wouldn’t be prepared to stand up in the middle of a crowded room and shout about!

Librarians and blogging

Latest SCONUL Focus has a number of articles on librarians blogging.  Read it here:

http://www.sconul.ac.uk/publications/newsletter/43/

Any thoughts or reflections people?

About a blog

I had a very productive meeting with Keith, Sarah and Sue Wednesday morning talking about various Biology related matters.  It’s always nice to stroll down to the ClinSci library, though I wish I’d remembered that we were meeting first thing before I trudged into the DWL Office first.  Would have saved on shoe leather.

One of the things we did talk about, that wasn’t strictly biological related was this blog itself.  We agreed that we’d:

• Meet in about three weeks to review the progress so far.
• Invite all those who came to the Web 2.0 day from the library to become contributors/readers.
• Consider the longer term plans for the blogs usage.
• Review the blogs progress after a further month.

I’ve a feeling organising this meeting will fall on Sarah or myself!