Group Project Proposal - Crestwood Reading Corner: Children's Book Review Blog

By: Ananya Dattagupta, Stephanie Farrar, Lana Fukushima, and Angelique Mullen

Introduction
The Crestwood Public Library staff would like to implement a blog for the library on Blogger.com. Derived from the term “weblog,” which means to keep a log on a website, a blog is a web page consisting of a series of posts or written updates. Displayed as individual entries, the posts are commonly arranged in reverse chronological order. Blogs often have a section below each post where readers can comment on the topic and participate in discussions if the blog owner enables this feature.

The Crestwood Public Library is located in the heart of a medium sized town with a population consisting mainly of families with children. The local elementary school is near the library, and many parents and children visit the library in the afternoons. While the Crestwood Public Library has a strong collection geared for children in elementary school, the library does not provide any service that offers parents guidance in assisting their children with appropriate reading selections.

By implementing a blog designed as a place for parents to read book reviews and suggestions for elementary reading materials, the Crestwood Public Library seeks to provide a large portion of the population with a reliable resource when seeking assistance in finding good books for children between the ages of five and eight. Through comments and discussions that will be enabled on the blog, parents will also be able to form a community and connect with each other on new levels. They will be encouraged to share thoughts and opinions based on the books, stories, themes and personal experiences with reading and with early elementary students.

This service will primarily help patrons in the book selection process, but it will also benefit library staff, since the blog will raise awareness of reading materials and offer insight a librarian may not be able to include in a face to face encounter.

Examples of Other Library Blogs
The following are examples of library blogs that offer reader’s advisory for children. They offer the best in practice for youth advisory blogs, and are similar to what is proposed for Crestwood Library’s new blog:

Canton Public Library: Kids Blog
http://www.cantonpl.org/kids
One of several blogs by this public library in Canton, Mississippi, the Kids page has many resources for children. There are Reader’s Advisory links, as well as informational posts for parents about topics related to early literacy. Other posts include programming notes, song links, videos, and community information related to kids.

Kalamazoo Public Library: Parenting and Kids Blog
http://www.kpl.gov/kids/blog/
Updated at least once a month but often weekly, this blog features programming notes about events for children at the Kalamazoo Public Library in Michigan. Each post is also tagged with folksonomic terms so that patrons can easily search the blog for books, materials, movies, or other literacy-related topics.

San Mateo County Library: Kids’s Voices
http://kids.smcl.org/en/blog
This fabulous blog has many authors who are all librarians at the various branches of the San Mateo County Library system. Updated every few days, most of the posts are information posts with Reader’s Advisory suggested centered on a particular theme. This reader’s advisory blog is fully integrated with the library’s main kid page, allowing the visitor to access games, books, and information for parents and teachers.

Wake County Public Libraries: The Kids’ Bookshelf
http://wakekidsbookshelf.wordpress.com/
This blog is a fabulous Reader’s Advisory page that is updated several times a week. Together with the main children’s page, the website creates a seamless experience for the visitor, combining community and the library. On the Reader’s Advisory page, there are book suggestions for all ages and in all genres, along with a handy tag cloud to access tagged posts of a certain topic. On the children’s page, there are links to book clubs, book reviews, websites, and other library services.

Possible Roadblocks to Implementation
While the Crestwood Public Library community and staff are open to new technologies being implemented in the library, there are still several roadblocks that could prevent immediate success of the blog.  Most of the staff members are knowledgeable about blogs, but often organizations fail to incorporate the right approach in their entries, and one area of concern involves the possibility of falling short of publishing original, quality content on a consistent and regular basis.  Also, the extended time commitment required of staff may cause difficulties completing all the tasks. This could lead to a failure to value quality readership, which is another serious roadblock often overlooked when measuring the success of organizational blogs. Finally, lack of effective marketing of the blog in the online community in order to draw a continuous flow of dedicated audience members is one of the major factors that could hinder the successful implementation of the blog.

The Crestwood Public Library children’s book review blog will take all these issues as mentioned above into serious consideration and continue in their endeavor to create and maintain a blog that will successfully cater to the information need of the community. The staff responsible for maintaining the blog will conduct an extensive evaluation of all the possible blogging techniques in order to publish interesting and unique material, then they will employ the one that best serves the purpose and needs of the blog. The staff will be aware of the fact that creating unique and original postings while maintaining consistency and regularity is of paramount importance and crucial to the success of the book review blog. Reviews will be regularly posted along with graphics, and each entry will include the age level for the book and publishing information. Also, the Crestwood Public Library children’s book review blog will be an open-comment blog. This will encourage two way communication between the library and parents. It engages and invites people to participate directly by posting in the comment box, thus making the blog a place of happening, giving users a reason to come back for more. Staff members will develop a schedule and set aside time to post and review blog comments so that readership is valued and users receive responses within an appropriate amount of time.

In addition to publishing original material and valuing readership, the staff will also put in considerable effort to market the blog effectively and make it well known in the community. Marketing efforts will be geared both in-house and in online settings. In-house efforts will include incorporating the blog address on general brochures and fliers provided by the youth services department. The youth services department librarians will also promote the blog through word of mouth during story time, reference interviews, and reader advisory interactions with parents and caretakers. Online efforts include posting links to the blog through the library’s existing online presence which consists of their website, Facebook, and Twitter accounts.  Also, adding highly searched keywords to the book reviews will increase the traffic flow in the blog. Crestwood Public Library staff responsible for the blog will meticulously choose the popular keywords that will make the blog visible to the searchers looking for quality reviews of children’s books. 

Software Implementation Suggestions
There are many options to choose from in terms of blogging software.  The Crestwood Public Library chose to make use of Google’s Blogger for the blog software simply because it is not only free, but also popular, easily accessible, and just as easily utilized.  Some other popular free blogging sites include Wordpress and Tumblr.

Maintenance Plan
In terms of maintenance, the Crestwood Public Library youth services librarian staff will be writing and posting content into the blog.  Each youth services librarian staff will be on a set rotation, taking turns at least once a week to post a book review on the blog site.  The librarians will have the option for their blog postings to be reviewed amongst themselves for feedback before being officially posted to the public online.  Whenever new youth services librarian staff are hired, blog training will be included with the other types of general training provided to new hires.  Although the actual content of each blog post will be at the discretion of the librarian writing the entry, some general guidelines will be established to encourage a cohesive voice as an institution.  The overall style of writing will be kept professional but casual, friendly, and inviting.  Each posting will be a maximum of  approximately 300 words in length, include short bibliographic information and a small image of the book cover, be tagged with the category or genre of the book, and titled with the name of the book being reviewed.  The librarian on duty for writing a blog posting for the week will also be held responsible for responding to any questions or comments made through the site during that time frame.

Assessment
To make sure the blog has the desired impact on children and their families, the Crestwood library staff will use several measures of assessment. First, staff members will view statistics available in Blogger to see how many visitors the blog gets every week and to track the number of unique visitors to the site. This could possibly be a measure of interest in the site. Staff will also review the open-ended comments, and they may even quantify them if there is a large number.

Other assessment measures will include tracking the circulation records of the materials suggested on the site to see if there are any increases. Attendance at programming events will also be monitored, to see if there is any increase in numbers resulting from the influence of the blog.

A final measure wil be an annual user survey and needs assessment that patrons are given. There, questions will be asked about the blog and feedback will be provided from regular library users. Librarians and staff will also get verbal feedback from patrons and visitors on an informal basis.

Prototype
Link to prototype:
http://crestwoodpubliclibrary.blogspot.com/

Screencasting

Here is my screencast demonstration on getting started with Twitter:

Here is the direct url:

http://www.screencast-o-matic.com/watch/cXfFiYDUs

Online Communities

Image from: Flickr

Of the online communities that I've viewed, I am most drawn to Flickr.  A large part of this is probably due to my being a naturally visual person.  But the simplicity of Flickr in terms of ease of use and navigation also immediately adds to my appreciation for it.  Everything is pretty much laid out in a format that is clear and intuitive for users.  As far as some of the "groups" within Flickr, there are numerous varieties to choose from that keep things interesting.  The "group pool" is the main contribution area, and the area for discussions is an added feature that allows users to interact with one another.  Although by taking a quick look at the "group pool" area, one will immediately get a sense for what the group is about, the front page of each group clearly states what the group is about, and the rules that apply to the group which is particularly helpful for newcomers.  Of the various online communities that I've viewed, the visual nature and ease of use really made Flickr stand out for me.  

Roles

In response to the following question:

“Do you see tools like Ask Metafilter and Yahoo! Answers as a threat to our role? Why or why not?”

No, I do not see these tools as a threat to the role of librarians.  I think in realizing the reasoning behind this, it’s important to understand the context of information seeking behavior.  Rubin (2004, p.38-41) discusses the differences between information wants versus needs, and seeking versus gathering behavior.  There are basically different types of questions, and numerous ways in which individuals can decide to go about satisfying their informational quest.  Online open community forums I feel offer a space in which more opinion or user experience based questions can best be answered.  If people can go directly to these forums to have these types of questions answered, it almost acts as a filter for libraries and librarians to be able to focus their energies on the other types of questions that may be more suitable for them to assist with.

Reference:

Rubin, R. E. (2004). Foundations of Library and Information Science, 2^nd edition. New York: NealSchuman Publishers, Inc.

Delicious Bookmarking Exercise

Image from: Delicious

It was interesting to explore the various available functionalities within Delicious.  Delicious not only allows one to create and organize content for themselves, but also share, search, and explore what others have saved.  All of the features of Delicious are intuitive, quick, and easy to utilize.  The added value of this tool lies in the ability to search for bookmarks using tags, view the popularity of particular bookmarks, view who bookmarked something, and access ones bookmarks from any computer with internet connection.  The ability to view bookmarks by popularity or by recent activity is also particularly helpful.  

Finding interesting and useful resources on the web by utilizing Delicious also supports efficiency in many ways.  Unlike a list of search results simply from a search engine, the sources on Delicious have to have already been reviewed and determined to be of value to someone for them to take the effort to tag and bookmark it.  The list of tags for a particular bookmark may also offer other search term options for someone to use in their quest.  The tagging feature does have its strengths and weaknesses though, as mentioned in my earlier posting entitled Tag & Find It with regards to tagging in general.  Although tagging does tend to use more commonly used language, because of the lack of controlled vocabulary and the inability for the system to differentiate the various definitions associated with a term, the task of tagging and searching could potentially be difficult.   

Free Range Collaboration

Organizational culture plays a significant factor in internal collaboration.  Both managerial and staff level support are essential to the success of internal collaborative efforts.  Either of these could also pose as potential barriers.  When there is a corporate culture that focuses on rewarding individual achievements instead of that which is accomplished by the group, in efforts to boost self-interest and personal advancement, individuals may feel more compelled to keep certain knowledge and ideas to themselves instead of sharing them with the rest of the group.

I would imagine that physical locality, time constraints, and technological capabilities will also play a factor in an organization’s capabilities for internal collaboration.  Collaborative efforts often take time, and an organization must be willing to spend time contributing to whatever it is that they are working together on to see positive results.  Members of an organization must also be able to work out arrangements in regard to physical locality.  In other words, members must be able to periodically gather in some sort of space to exchange their thoughts and contribute to the collaboration.  If it is not feasible for this space to be physical, then a virtual space must be established.  Access to proper technological tools, and the available staff knowledge to utilize these tools will then also play a large role in the ability for collaborative efforts to be achieved.      

Tag & Find It

Image from: Delicious Scraps

Some of the weaknesses of tagging for making content more findable online are also its strengths.  With regards to online tagging, Farkas (2007) discusses the differences between folksonomies and taxonomies.  Taxonomies are usually created by “large standard-making bodies” (p. 134), utilize controlled vocabulary, and are hierarchical.  Folksonomies on the other hand, are created by anyone who chooses to do so, utilize open vocabulary, and are flat (p.134-135).  Tagging online typically involves the use of folksonomies. 

There are a myriad of terms that people can use to describe something.  In using controlled vocabulary, those performing a search will be directed to the appropriate term for their inquiry.  However with tagging, and without the use of controlled vocabulary, people are free to use whatever terms they choose, which could potentially lead to difficulties for other individuals who may not use those particular words in their search to find it.  Some words also have numerous meanings, and because tags are flat and unable to differentiate between which definition a word pertains to, some search results may result in unrelated and undesirable content to appear.  The flip side to all of this is that tagging and folksonomies use terms that are more commonly used among the general population, and therefore has the benefit of power in numbers.    

I suppose as with all things, there are both strengths and weaknesses to consider.

Reference:

Farkas, M. G. (2007). Social software in libraries: Building collaboration, communication, and community online. Medford, NJ: Information Today.

New York Public Library Marketing Critique

Image from: NYPL

The New York Public Library is undoubtedly a well-established and renowned institution.  The nearly hundred locations within the New York Public Library system are indicative of their sheer size.  Their online presence beyond their website falls nothing short of showcasing their Goliath-like abilities and reach in digital realms as well.  They have online accounts with Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr, Foursquare, YouTube, VoiceThread, and iTunes.  In addition, although the main access point for their blogs are through their website, they have 29 different blogs with the ability for patrons to follow them via RSS feeds.  The breadth, quality of, and efforts in maintaining all of their various online accounts are impressive.

Mission Statement

A critical component of marketing efforts lies in having a clear understanding of the brand which is being represented.  An institution’s mission statement sheds light onto its brand, and should be the intention behind what drives all their actions.  In reviewing New York Public Library’s mission statement and core values, we are able to establish a framework from which they operate and design their marketing, branding, and outreach efforts.

New York Public Library’s Mission Statement:

The mission of The New York Public Library is to inspire lifelong learning, advance knowledge, and strengthen our communities.

To deliver on this promise, we rely on three great resources—our staff, our collections, and our physical and virtual spaces—as well as on a set of core values.

New York Public Library’s Core Values:

ACCOUNTABILITY.

We take responsibility for delivering on our commitments and for the stewardship of our materials and spaces.

EXCELLENCE.

Only the finest of everything is good enough for the least of us.

EXPERTISE.

We are relentless in our efforts to better understand our communities, our collections, and our users.

FREEDOM.

We are free and open to all. We treat everyone with respect and compassion.

INNOVATION.

We are always learning. We are constantly exploring new ways of doing things better and doing better things.

PASSION.

We love the Library, we love New York, and we love what we do.

TEAMWORK.

We celebrate the diversity of our experiences and build connections. We trust each other.

The message under their mission statement indicating “To deliver on this promise, we rely on three great resources—our staff, our collections, and our physical and virtual spaces—as well as on a set of core values” (NYPL, 2011) also clearly points to their recognition of “virtual spaces” as a valuable marketing tool.

Marketing Efforts

When accessing the New York Public Library’s homepage, we are immediately presented with bold and simple graphic representations of the words ”Discover,” “Connect,” and “Get Inspired,” under which the three main points of their mission statement, “Inspiring lifelong learning, Advancing knowledge, Strengthening our communities” are listed in bold typeface. 

Main area of NYPL’s homepage:

Image from: NYPL

Practically every clickable link on the homepage aside for two brings the user to a webpage that ends with the same bottom footer area, which again repeats the three word categories of ”Discover,” “Get Inspired,” and “Connect”.

Footer example:

Image from: NYPL

 



The area under “Connect” lists a variety of ways in which patrons can follow the library online through a simple click on the various graphic icons.  It is evident here that the library has accounts in Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, YouTube, iTunes, Tumblr, VoiceThread, and the ability to sign up for RSS feeds from their blogs, and e-newsletters.

Image from: NYPL

The link and page entitled “Connect with NYPL” showcases all the ways in which their patrons can choose to connect with them including, e-newsletter, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, FourSquare, YouTube, iTunes, and Flickr.

Image from: NYPL

In addition, there is a link that connects them to the many blogs by the library, and another link to their VoiceThread page.

Although the format and layout of each page varies, many of the pages that have a right sidebar column area will include buttons to “Donate Now!” or chat with a librarian, or “Like” the library on Facebook.  This area will also include feeds from their blogs or feature areas of interest.

Image from: NYPL

Image from: NYPL

Evaluation of Marketing Efforts

A most notable strength of their marketing effort lies in their offering numerous avenues and access points in which their patrons can connect with them online beyond their website.  They not only offer a wide variety of other outlets, but they repeatedly offer them on practically every page or account associated with them.  Every account associated with the library offers ways to connect to their other accounts, or is linked in some way with each other.

The main area of their home Facebook page for example features links to “share” on Facebook, “follow” on Twitter, and “watch” on YouTube.

Image from: NYPL’s Facebook

The left sidebar area of their Facebook page also offers numerous other ways for patrons to connect:

Image from: NYPL’s Facebook

 A posting on their Twitter account mentions and links to their Facebook page:

Image from: NYPL’s Twitter

The right sidebar area of their Tumblr page for example also features feeds from their Twitter account and links to their other accounts:

Image from: NYPL’s Tumblr

The marketing effort by the New York Public Library far exceeds my expectations, and it is difficult to see any shortcomings.  Perhaps one observation made while examining their website is how surprising it is that they do not offer any quick links to directly connecting to their other online forums from their main homepage.  

Branding Efforts

In line with their marketing efforts, the key to the New York Public Library’s successful branding efforts lie in their ability to repeatedly offer a consistent message in their various media forums.  The strength and consistency of their brand resides in their ability to incorporate their library’s mission and values into every aspect of what they do and create.  Although the content, format, and authors of the various online forums they maintain are varied, they are able to maintain a common voice through their unified values.  Repeated imagery and a few choice words in all their various platforms also help maintain their brand. 

The most powerful tool in branding efforts often lies in the institution logo.  The logo must be consistent and strategically placed on every representation of that institution, as is the case with the logo for the New York Public Library:  

Image from: NYPL

As mentioned earlier, in addition to repeating their mission throughout their library webpage, their mission statement is also repeated on their various other online platforms as well.

The New York Public Library’s mission statement on Facebook:

Image from: NYPL’s Facebook

The same mission statement repeated on their Tumblr account:

Image from: NYPL’s Tumblr

The mission statement again, yet this time on their YouTube page:

Image from: NYPL’s YouTube

Suggestions

If I were hired by the library as a social media consultant, the one small suggestion I would make is to perhaps add quick links to their various online forums and ways for their patrons to connect right on the bottom of their homepage.  Other than this, I think the New York Public Library is doing an excellent job in their marketing efforts, and can only suggest that they continue on with the inspirational work that they do.