goblin cartoons

In less than two hours I will be hosting a “Blog Breakfast” at my library, showing my coworkers how our intranet WordPress blog works, what the blogging guidelines are (as developed by the Web Committee), and how they can all contribute to the blog. We’ll have donuts and juice. I’m bringing my own coffee, because I’m a bit wary of the coffee and condiments we have in the staff breakroom, and nobody at the library drinks coffee besides myself and the branch manager.

Initiate Tech-Savvy Teacher-Mode…NOW!

I’ve been working on proposals to my library on how we could use blogging in our daily operations. It started because I thought we should have a blog on our website for the public to read and comment on. My supervisor started asking me questions that led to me realizing that yes, we could use an internal staff blog as a better way of archiving important informations, cutting down on mass emails, paper memos and word-of-mouth info chains.

But it hadn’t occured to me use blogging as a library OPAC. Until I read Jenny Levine’s ALA Techsource post “Library 2.0 in the Real World.” Jumpin’ Jupiter! What a brilliant idea! An OPAC that allows for folksonomy tags, comments, easy revisions and updates! An OPAC with pages that can be permalinked! An OPAC that easily incorporates other Web 2.0 techniques! Librarians blogging reference questions that make searching the OPAC easier!

My mind is blown. I feel like a halfwit lab assistant watching the mad scientists at work.

As of today, my place of work has its very own blog!

Er, sort of.

Since my first day on the job, I’ve been pushing for my library to start a blog. There are so many good reasons for a public library to have a blog, but I won’t go into them all here and now. Suffice to say, I put on the hard sell like P.T. Barnum at the Fifth Annual Convention of Slackjawed Suckers, and to my surprise and delight, my coworkers–who are anything but slackjawed suckers–responded with enthusiasm.

Tentative enthusiasm.

They all see the perks of having a blog, and they all say it sounds like a great idea, but nothing happens at my library overnight. Baby steps, all the way.

In the meantime, my branch manager decided having an internal blog for our branch employees sounded like a swell idea. No more paper memos to be lost, no more emails that miss one employee, everything nicely archived and categorized and updated on a daily basis. So it was decided that a blog would be created on our intranet, just for the branch employees, and it would serve as a test case for starting up a public blog.

This was a few months ago. I decided WordPress would work best for us, and it sounded like the easiest to install. Unfortunately, only one employee seems to know how to work with PHP and MySQL, and she’s a part-time employee who doesn’t technically work in Tech Support, and she already has a kajillion things to do around the library. Add to this some technical problems she had in installing WordPress on our server, and the speedy installation dragged on across weeks and weeks.

But she finally got it all sorted out. Well, sort of sorted out: there still seem to be some PHP glitches that show up from time to time. And we haven’t figured out who’s going to be posting to it. And we haven’t officially named it. And the branch manager, being on vacation, hasn’t seen it yet. But by golly, we’ve got ourselves a blog!