We have a pilot project for an internal WordPress blog at our library. It went live as we began ripping up the inside of the building. Staff were told it was there and they were welcome to experiment, but that it was going to be launched officially with training later. I’ve been flicking email stuff that I want archived there, and a couple of people have made a couple of posts…but otherwise staff haven’t had the time to learn something new.

In the next few weeks, we start revamping it as a reference desk blog. The original version tried to cover the whole library and replace a few email lists. We had a separate RSS feed for each category…nice idea but a bit too confusing for most people I think.

Co-incidentally, I’ve had a couple of email conversations with other Australian librarians about implementing internal blogs, so I think ’tis the season for it.

One person was wondering about blogging policies. A good swag are found in the comments on Karen Schneider’s post, Blogging Policies and Procedures. You may also get some useful information from the general discussion of internal communications wikis/blogs happening on the Library 2.0 Ning network.

Another discussion involved getting staff buy in and support of senior management. It’s a hard one as the advantages are long term ones – mainly an easily searchable archive. Most training will focus on the posting side of it and it will be months before there are enough posts there for the searchablility to be a big advantage. I’d keep stressing the final outcomes during training.

We are treating the internal blog as an experiment and a training opportunity. We can get used to the interface and iron out any problems before we implement any other blogs aimed at our community.

If an internal blog is replacing some email communication, there comes a point where buy in becomes less voluntary. It’s just annoying to have two places to check for the same information, so someone is going to have to formulate guidelines about what goes on the blog and what is emailed. Clear guidelines, which are sensible and useable. I think it will take more than just that to make people change their habits. Especially when it is actually easier to send an email than post to a blog.

I’ve concluded that making sure staff understand RSS, and are using an aggregator, comes first with most L2.0 initiatives. With coaxing, people can handle one extra place to go, but having to check two work wikis, three work blogs and a work Flickr account for changes would be really annoying. This is an issue for a password or IP protected internal blog – web-based aggregators like the highly popular bloglines and google reader won’t be let near the feed to harvest it. I don’t have a real solution, but may try using RSS Popper which integrates with Outlook. If Outlook is left logged in on a PC within the allowed IP range, then you can read the RSSPopper feed externally via webmail.

I was pondering this afternoon whether all this Library 2.0 stuff is really useful. If it is, then why do we need to work out ways to sell it? Many of us seem to be getting the skills and playing with the toys outside of work, even when we have workplaces like mine that make time for new technologies. Then I remembered staying up late writing web pages waaaaay, waaaaay back in the early nineties so I could demo to library staff the advantages of the internet. And being a bit worried that I was raving about a techno-hobby-horse that would never be relevant to what we did in libraries.