Farewell and good luck

As most regular readers of this blog know, I’m departing Leicester tomorrow, which means with regret this’ll be my last blog post here.  I’ve very much enjoyed sharing these infrequent, but I hope mostly interesting, snippets of library life here with the broader audience; and in the meantime I’m sure my fellow bloggers here can keep the content flowing.

And I hope you’ve enjoyed them too!

Another new contributor

I’m delighted to announce we have another contributor to the blog, Terese Bird. Terese will be working with Emma Kimberley on setting up the Graduate Student Media Zoo. Though she’s working with the library, Terese is actually working as a Learning Technologist for the BDRA. I’m sure we’ll all look forward to her input.

Welcome to a new member of the blog!

Just a short post to welcome our newest member of the UoL Library Blogging family Emma Kimberley.  Emma started recently at the library as our new Research Forum Facilitator, something about which I’ll let her post about in far more detail (and accuracy) than I can cover! 

I’m sure we all look forward to her posts with great interest.  Emma’s also on Twitter, and I’ll be adding her ID to the blog front page shortly.

Rules of blogging

For those that might be interested, there’s an article by me in the latest CILIP Gazette (14th August 2009) on writting effective blogs for librarians.  Currently available online free of charge here.  Enjoy, and try not to point out how many of my suggestions my posts have breached over the years…

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?

We’re number…#31

On a list published the other day over on the GetDegrees Web site, this blog made the top 50 librarian blogs.  I think I’m quietly quite pleased about that.  Thanks for the support and all your contributions my fellow bloggers!

With thanks to @ellyssa for spotting this list!

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!

Threaded comments – now available

WordPress have rolled out threaded comments, which I’ve enabled on the blog. Most of you will be familier with this – but just in case you aren’t – what it means is you can reply to a post as normal, but that you can also directly reply to an individual comment – and someone else can reply to that.

Hopefully you’ll see shortly how it works in practise

Blog readership – Feb update

Just thought I’d recap on where we are with blog stats.  We’re getting a healthy, if not enormous, level of hittage.

• Jul 08 – 195
• Aug 08 – 144
• Sept 08 – 276
• Oct 08 – 145
• Nov 08 – 406
• Dec 08 – 653
• Jan 09 – 746
• Feb 09 – 79

Obviously Feb is only three days old, but this does give us a clear upward trend.  Taking it as average hits/day

• Jul 08 – 6.3
• Aug 08 – 4.6
• Sept 08 – 9.2
• Oct 08 – 4.7
• Nov 08 – 13.5
• Dec 08 – 21.1
• Jan 09 – 24.1
• Feb 09 – 26.3

It looks like Feb is continuing the trend upwards.  I’m especially proud of the December bump, considering we had far fewer posts in December than normal and the long Christmas break.  Seems people were still coming on by to read the site.  Long may it continue.

This is a test of the voting system

It seems only appropriate on inauguration day to try out the polls feature on Word Press; hence the somewhat meaningless poll above.  Though don’t let that stop you voting!

In a previous job I would have loved to have had access to a simple poll tool like this, but at the time setting one up on the in-house systems required quite detailed scripting knowledge and permissions.  Thus this is much easier.  I wonder if any of our blog regulars can think of a useful little poll we could run on here?

Vote for us!

I just remembered that we (the blog that is) has been nominated for the best Librarian/Library EduBlog 2008.  And voting is now open.

So go vote for us now!

I don’t think we’re in with that much of a chance really, but it is nice to be nominated all the same, and a very positive reflection on the efforts we’ve all made towards making this a place to share experiences.  Here’s to a successful 2009.

Happy Christmas all.

Blog Review meeting 2.0

Keith, Sarah W, Selina and myself just held our latest blog review meeting.  In lieu of minutes here are a few brief notes on our discussions:

• We reviewed the blog’s development to date and agreed that an excellent voice has been found for the posts by all authors.  As a result the blog could be regarded as a defacto standard for other potential Library blogs, along with a body of expertise to advise as needed.
• The award nomination from Alan, and praise from CILIP for our work was noted.
• We agreed that the community focus of the blog would remain those already invited to contribute (along with their successors and alternates) so as to ensure it remains relevant to the professional activities of the library.
• PMG have asked us to go talk about the blog to them, so I’ll be asking them for a date and sorting out which of us will go along.
• Questions from us to PMG include: whom should we advocate the blog to internally, whom would they be advocating it to, the matter of Twirl’s availability to those staff that require it and the possibility of PMG making a post occasionally (they are already encouraged to, but have not yet posted or commented).
• The new Enquiry Manager will be invited by myself to become involved with the blog in some respect.
• We agreed to take the requirement for each comment to be approved off to see if this increases the number of comments.  However, we’re not allowing anonymous commenting so we have an audit trail to follow if needed to the source of any comments.
• We agreed to tell suitable local contacts about the blog, if we’ve not mentioned it already.
• We agreed to notify all library staff about the blog, and invite them to comment.
• We agreed that we will remove the block on search engines detecting the blog in January, thus making the blog visible to all and in keeping with the OA movement.  Noting that it is already visible if you are aware of the URL.
• We agreed to meet to review the blog again in Feb/Mar 2008

So all in all, we are pleased with the blog as a tool