Should your public library have a blog—or more blogs than it already has?
I can’t answer that question. I can say there’s a good chance your library could benefit from one or more blogs.
If anyone tells you that your library must have a blog, they’re wrong. Very few solutions apply to every public library, no matter how large or small.
On the other hand, hundreds of public libraries (serving as few as 400 people and as many as 2.3 million) already use blogs to good effect. I believe thousands of public libraries could serve their communities well by initiating blogs or adding new blogs.
Those are the first four paragraphs of Chapter 1 of Public Library Blogs: 252 Examples. Looking at it now, you could substitute “Facebook page” or “Twitter account” or “Pinterest” or… for “blog” and I’d probably sign my name to the statement.
I find it difficult to look back at this book, six years later, and figure out just why I did it—except that I thought some libraries might find it helpful to have “similar” examples and see how blogs had been doing, at least from an external view.
I did not set about finding all the public library blogs; if I was crazy enough to do this one again, I’d probably start with library websites and look for blogs directly. What I did was probably more sensible (but far less inclusive): I took two major lists (one from LISWiki, one from Blogging Libraries), yielding more than 530 links, including—naturally—quite a few duplicates between the two lists. The book explains how I whittled that list down to 209 blogs—then added other blogs from the 196 libraries represented to arrive at the final 252 blogs. (The basic criteria: The blog had to be English-language, beginning no later than December 2006, with at least one post in two of the three months March, April and May 2007, with enough internal evidence to demonstrate meeting those criteria. That last criterion was probably too narrow at the time and would certainly be too narrow in a reexamination.)
The book discusses various metrics—expressed as text descriptions or lists of standout blogs, not tables—and, for some three-quarters of its length, describes each blog and offers sample posts.
This was one book that I published both via Lulu and via CreateSpace, making it available on Amazon (and adding an ISBN). This naturally resulted in huge sales via Amazon may or may not have aided the pitiful sales—and those sales probably shouldn’t have been a surprise. As of December 12, 2013, Worldcat.org shows 22 libraries holding one or the other version.
The first quarter of the book appeared in the May 2009 Cites & Insights. A limited update appeared in the September 2009 issue. The Lulu cover is one of my favorites: A photo of the library at Ephesus (which my wife & I visited on a cruise).
Crawford, Walt. Public Library Blogs: 252 Examples. 2007 (pbk). CreateSpace edition: ISBN 9781434805591
