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In his presentation, Fletcher posed the question, "why a processing blog?" His answer:
- Inform audiences of your progress in processing the collection,
- Highlight interesting discoveries,
- Provide glimpses of how archivists work, and
- Solicit information about items in the collection (especially if you have lots of unidentified images!).
How do you go about creating a processing blog? Good question, and Fletcher had the answers.
Planning the Blog
- Look at a lot of blogs for design ideas,
- Sketch layouts on paper to see if they'll really work/do what you want,
- What blogging software will you use/be required to use by your institution? What are its limitations?
- Experiment with various designs on a test server before going live,
- Let IT do the IT stuff!
Letting People Know About Your Blog
- Announce it on listservs,
- Notify other bloggers,
- Let your library/archives PR staff do their thing,
- Speak to students (or anyone else) about it,
- Identify people who might be interested and let them know (those pre-existing communities of users Yakel talked about).
Develop a Readership
- Use a clean, simple design,
- Use a friendly, conversational tone in your blog posts,
- Semi-regular contributions (1-2 per week) keeps them coming back,
- Involve other staff -- it's ok to have a variety of voices, but do keep one consistent style,
- Writing should reflect the material, but it's ok if your personality comes out as well, this is a blog,
- Fletcher suggests that you should respond to comments for a feeling of dialog with your users,
- Tie-in postings with anniversaries and other events,
- Use the blog to leverage additional support, eg. let the media know, host an identification party.
More good ideas for all of us to consider.
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