The Library Blog - a Changing Role?

In the early days of our blog, we highlighted things directly coming up in courses or concerts. A Beethoven concerto? We posted links to useful material about Beethoven.  A concert series? We found links to the artistes taking part.  And so on.  But as time went by, it was obvious that people would be searching for that kind of info themselves.

We still post information that will help our students for particular assignments - eg, how to search our online resources. How to conduct a literature search, or how to cite references in your essay.  What goes in a bibliography.  New material for a particular course - such as the Dalcroze material we bought in recently.  And reminders about things that we've mentioned before, if appropriate!

Sometimes we also flag up events, external courses or funding opportunities.  If we're sent a bundle of leaflets, then we may find the hyperlink and mention it online.  Or we may flag up new publications, or things that will appeal to a wide cross-section of our readers, or initiatives and projects of library-related interest.

Knowing that more people use Twitter than visit library blogs, we tend to post links to the blog, via Twitter.  We also share our blogposts with teaching colleagues. If they think the info relevant, then hopefully they share it with students that they teach.  Whilst Moodle and the Portal have vital information for our students, we like to think that our blog has a complementary role, and also of course, it can reach out to a wider range of people, not just staff and students.

So in our opinion, the library blog is not dead.  We have our own niche.  We're glad you found us - do call again!

What Makes A Good Blog? Twelve Tips for Library Bloggers

WHAT MAKES A GOOD BLOG?

We looked at our blog traffic over the past month.  How many people actually visited, and were there any patterns?  Well yes, actually – there were!

1. The bottom line is, you have to keep posting.  If you don’t post, the visitors don’t visit.  The more you post, the more they visit. 
2. Schedule your blogposts! You can schedule in Blogger and Wordpress.  This helps take care of days when you know you won’t be around to post.
3. Be sure to share your posts on Twitter, and use something like Bufferapp to schedule tweets too:  http://bufferapp.com
4. Take care with headings.  Once you’ve uploaded your post, the hyperlink won’t change. So use catchy headings with words that Google can find; you can change the blogpost heading later if you need to.
5. Always add keywords/tags.  Try to make these consistent over time.
6. Know your audience – what makes them tick?
7. Know your product – we’re a library, so our main concern is to promote physical and electronic resources, not to mention our ever-helpful library staff! 
8. In a library context, e-resources attract interest.  So does copyright, interesting new stock, musicians’ health, music competitions, creativity, learning and research skills, and employability. 
9. Weblinks are good.  Readers want to know where they can find more.
10. Don’t try to write a scholarly essay, and keep the blogposts a reasonable length.
11. Have a conversational tone: expressions like “the musicologists amongst us” are not inclusive, and won’t really even attract the musicologists!  You want readers to react with, “Hey, this is for me!”, and not “Oh, stuffy academics again”. 
12. Be the same age as your audience.  No, that’s silly – obviously we’re kidding!  Your audience could be any age.  Students can be any age.  Staff can be marginally older than students, or heading for retirement.  You cannot be the same age as your audience, but you can try to ensure that your posts will appeal to as wide an audience as possible.

A blogpost for teachers and educationalists

Why don't students remember what they've learned?  Californian pastor and web-designer Joe Kirby has his own ideas, on his blog entitled Pragmatic Education.

There's interesting stuff here, though it's a bit hard to establish Kirby's context.  Read it with an open mind.  'Whittaker' would have liked to see an 'about the author' page!

Free-Spirited Dance

Isadora Duncan (1877-1927)

Performing artists of all kinds may be interested in the Bibliolore blog.  It's run by the folk who compile RILM, one of our indexing services.  Although they index music journals, books and recordings, their Bibliolore blog often touches on other performing arts too, and it's always a quality posting.

Today there's a blogpost about the famous dancer, Isadora Duncan. You'll find a video-clip of a dance reconstruction too.

Head of Drama Hugh Hodgart challenged 'Whittaker' to blog about mortality today.  I'd decided to do  posting about Shakespeare, entitled, 'Mortality and Immortality'.  However, that can be another day. 

Because, as we all know, Isadora Duncan faced her own mortality in a sadly untimely way -  strangled by her own scarf as she drove along in an open-topped car. 

If there's a moral here at all, it's to wish all freshers a happy, free-spirited first year - but be careful with long dangling scarves!

Bibliolore homepage:- http://bibliolore.org/

Cold Shivers Down Spine: the end of Librarian Blogging? No, No, No!

Whittaker gaped and stretched his eyes.  What?! Someone is blogging about the end of an era for librarian blogging?  

This is serious stuff!  Read theWikiMan's posting. 

Be reassured.  Whittaker isn't going away any time soon!

Writing about Social Media in Libraries - Whittaker seeks Feedback, please!

Whittaker Live has been blogging about the performing arts for over a decade.  This Wednesday, I'm going to Birmingham, where I'll be talking to my peers about social media in academic music libraries.  I'd really appreciate your help!  What I need is feedback: when you visit Whittaker Live, do you get what you expected?  Are you likely to return to the site?  Are you favourably impressed, or disappointed?  (If disappointed, what did you hope to find?)

I do also blog in a private capacity.  True Imaginary Friends has been my blog whilst preparing my first scholarly book for publication.  (The book was released in March 2013, so hopefully I'll soon be able to read some reviews.)  I also set up my professional development blog called Airs and Graces CPD, as part of the 23 Things project, though I only write on it occasionally now.

As well as blogging, I tweet as @WhittakerLib and as myself @Karenmca.  During the week, I try to maintain a professional persona in either capacity.  This idea of different personae interests me, and I'm curious what other folk do.  I find I use Twitter in several quite distinct ways - this is another intriguing angle, and I wonder if anyone else has categorised their tweets like this.

I use Diigo for social bookmarking, and sometimes share my lists.  I also occasionally use Storify.  I've made a deliberate policy not to use Facebook except for family and a very few close friends, and I'm a limited user of LinkedIn.

If you're a librarian or a library user - any kind of library - I'd love to hear from you.  If you're part of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland community, thank you for following, and for letting me share 'your' blog with other interested parties!

Scottish Roundup - the best of Scottish blogging

Worth a look: http://scottishroundup.co.uk/

Folk music, meteorology and blogging (the delights of Whittaker's inbox!)

So pretty that we had to share it with you!

• Warwick Folk Festival - 26th - 29th July.  More details ...
• Zetoc alerts: don't forget you can set up Zetoc to tell you when articles are published in your field.  Set up an alert here, or ask your subject librarian to help you set one up.  Mind you, sometimes you get wee surprises.  Like the one 'Whittaker' received today:-
  Scottish weather in Mendelssohn's music
  Kay, A, in WEATHER - LONDON (published by the Royal Meteorological Society), Vol.67, no.3 (2012) pp.83-83
      
• 'Blogging is quite simply the most important thing academics should be doing right now'. So said two social scientists at the London School of Economics.  Controversial - do you agree?

The ever-attentive Whittaker

'Whittaker' has been - well, attentive, this week.  There's been a lot of listening and looking going on:-

• In the Metropolis - 'Whittaker' attended RMA Council meeting (and left Glasgow crazily early enough to see the John Martin exhibition at the Tate Britain)
• On the Twittersphere - Whittaker spotted new research linking literacy with musicality (blogged it on WhittakerLive, naturally!)
• In the press - Whittaker flagged up an interesting film exhibition (blogged that on WhittakerLive, too)
• In person - I've been making it easier to retrieve CDs of electronic music by doing extra subject indexing
• In person - I've been explaining how to upload articles onto Moodle for class use
• In person - I've been discussing how to help students develop their research skills
• In person - wasn't the lunchtime concert fab today?!

- But seriously, Information Services do listen, and we do take on board what our readers say.  So if you need help sourcing information or doing something nifty with Moodle, please do come and ask us!

Why Whittaker Blogs

‘Whittaker’ had a few days of leave carried over from last year’s entitlement, so he’s taking a long weekend. But will ‘his’ readers survive without him? For anyone chancing upon this page, here are a few random but carefully-weighed comments.

So, why does Whittaker blog? To borrow Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s words, “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways”:-

• This blog is intended to inform staff and students of the performing arts.
• It aims to flag up useful and interesting websites, forthcoming events, new or rare library acquisitions, services offered by the library, and other sources of information, study, research or career support.
• Thus, this week it has offered readers details of a research symposium; old Scottish musicians and song collectors William Motherwell, William Tytler and Alexander Campbell; an arts and humanities streaming workshop; a Steve Reich 75th birthday competition; British Library Postgraduate Open Days; thoughts about a research query on the Lordship of the Isles; and the Scottish Mental Health Arts and Film Festival. Nothing if not varied!
• Our staff and students are musicians, actors, community arts animateurs, stage designers, film and television directors, jazz improvisers and ballet dancers, to name but a few.
• ‘Whittaker’ keeps a weather eye for interesting trends coming up on the Twitter scene, but ‘he’ will not be found on Facebook, as ‘he’ doesn’t care to discuss his private life on social media websites.  This is a professional blog.
• Meanwhile, the combination of upcoming cultural and information trends, with intriguing historical facts pertaining to old Scottish song collections, can be attributed to Whittaker’s own dual-qualified background in library & information science and musicology. He does try to seek out drama, film/television and ballet snippets, but depends on his informants to feed him interesting titbits in these spheres.
• The author of Whittaker does also occasionally contribute to other blogs such as TheThesisWhisperer, lurks around Twitter’s #PhDchat on Wednesday evenings, and authors the Jobs.ac.uk Music blog in 'his' spare time, to keep in touch with the world of research and offer support to those following him along the doctoral path.

If you like what you read here, please do comment. Any suggestions are always considered with an open mind.

When to blog, when to tweet?

Blogs are more discursive, and give the chance to pull info together from different sources.  Like my WhittakerLive posting on the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland namechange, or my separate pages on Minstrels and Metaphors.

Tweets are great for single, punchy comments or notifications, and messages to individuals or all followers. And that's why I both blog and tweet, but I have an RSS feed from Twitter to Blogspot, so you can catch up with me both ways!

By the way, you might be interested in Leonard Cassuto's blogpost about academic blogging, in the Guardian Professional's Higher Education Network (advice, insight, and best practice from the community). Does blogging help progress for an early career academic?  Read it here.

Why do scholars blog?

Inger Mewburn, aka The Thesis Whisperer, runs a very successful research blog. (Do visit http://thethesiswhisperer.wordpress.com/.)  However, Inger also, from time to time, blogs elsewhere.  Today, 2nd September, I caught up with her on the Networked Researcher blog: her post is called Is there a new digital divide brewing?  It makes interesting reading.


"Whittaker" started asking "himself" why he maintains WhittakerLive.  Actually, it's all there on the sidebar:-

WhittakerLive has posted friendly and informative postings since 1999. We showcase performing arts websites, and higher education links that will interest our staff and student performers.


Current awareness: useful weblinks, publications, recordings, events etc. Also postings on learning skills, research support  and information literacy.

It's a wide remit, which is why the postings might seem rather random at first glance.  However, this week's postings are pretty representative of what we aim to achieve.  So, what have we got?  Obituaries for Ray Fisher (Scottish ballad singer) and Alasdair Gillies (bagpiper extraordinaire).  An 'on this day' posting for Joseph Ritson, an influential 18th century antiquarian. The name-change from RSAMD to Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.  Digitised Beethoven.  The first call for papers, for Musica Scotica 2012 conference.

Now, the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland is not just about Scottish music, or indeed about classical music or music history.  It's drama, dance, film and TV, performance and improvisation ... so please do suggest newsworthy items or websites that are of potential use to staff and students working in these areas!