Showing off your best bits

I'm interested in blogs that talk about the specifics of what an organisation does.  I'll illustrate this with Penguin Books.  We all know you can find out what Penguin publishes and buy Penguin titles on their website, but by linking from their website to their blog Penguin can talk about the specifics of what they're publishing, company achievements and inside information.  Similarly, to use a library example, Bath Spa University has a library blog, where the librarians update and inform readers about current projects.  It is used as a way to communicate current information, as the bloggers themselves put it:

"Its purpose is to inform you of many of the complex and diverse services the library provides at Bath Spa, as well as some useful tips on how we can improve your study."

That's exactly what information professionals should be doing; our trade is all about making information accessible.  Using the tagging system, it is also possible to find information on specific topics within Bath Spa Library's blog, which stops it being a jumbled feed of all and everything in between.  Using a blog in this way is essentially the same as maintaining a 'news' section on a library website.  However, using a separate blog host allows the librarians themselves to write content and upload it, without having to liaise with IT colleagues about formatting, fonts etc.

The British Library also does blogging.  A lot.  Masses of it.  I follow numerous BL twitter feeds, and they have a full range of blogs on the BL blog website.  If you take a look at these blogs they include expert bloggers, essays about special collections and series of blogs on their current exhibition.  This is an excellent way to raise interest in your resources and show off special collections that are normally reserved for researchers.

At a CPD25 conference last year, the head of libraries at London Metropolitan University spoke about the need for libraries to diversify and differentiate by showing off unique resources to encourage use and demonstrate their value in the face of tough budgetary decisions.  At my own institution I would love to see a British Library style blog incorporated into our electronic resources for our very special collection of copies of The Athenaeum.  There is already a section on the library website about using this collection, but this is really the only promotion of this resource.  We get a few enquiries from researchers, but a blog would raise the profile of this resource enormously and would make for an interesting read.  A few weeks ago I was seeking information for a researcher about the coinage of 'folk-lore', and found reviews of newly published works by Hans Christian Andersen, Dickens and Wilkie Collins!  It was fascinating to see these reviews in their original setting.  Inviting collaboration between university academics, library staff and researchers to occasionally blog about the content of this little used resource would make for fascinating reading, exciting work and demonstrate something that web 2.0 is great at doing: bringing new life to the old.