blogs create community dialog
1 Jun 05 in meta | 2 comments
I haven’t been writing much on walking paper lately because of competing projects. One of the neat things I’ve been working on is westernspringshistory.org If you visit the site, you’ll learn that the TFML got a grant to work in conjunction with the local historical society to digitize a portion of its historic home collection. Like everything, it isn’t perfect, and like many things, it is a work in progress, but I’d like to point out that the site is run by WordPress, so it was a no brainer to have (moderated) commenting available for each house. We were hoping that people would add data to the project by sharing their knowledge and questions. After everyone in town received a nice brochure about the project, our hopes came true. Take this comment from 4350 Lawn:
This was our first house in Western Springs. The year was 1976 – Memorial Day weekend. A parade marching by woke us our first morning – it was then we fell in love with this wonderful town!
We lived on the North side of this two family house. The beautiful high ceilings, carved fireplace and large rooms were very unique. Only spent 3 years in this house – welcomed our first born child and decided this was the place to raise our family.
The comment on 619 47threquests more information, and invites us to take an updated photo of the house.
The library has yet to reply to the comments, but when we do we’ll be sure to email the people, and post our reply on the website. This interaction is amazing, and leaves me wanting more. The moderation process is quite simple (alerts are sent to our email address when a comments is awaiting moderation, where we can approve – or deny if it happens to be spam). The ease of this leads me to believe we should venture into some things I’ve thought about doing for quite some time, like enabling comments on our Readers Advisory pages, or creating a special section on the website for discussion. These things seem like a can of worms that could be well worth opening. Imagine a library gathering their community virtually and creating a library based web community!
Anyone else have experience with user generated content on a library website?
1 Jun 05 at 8:13 am (#)
jessamyn:
WordPressifying and a lot of content addition done by yours truly! Congrats on the launch, the whole thing wound up looking very good indeed. Hope your library likes it.
1 Jun 05 at 10:27 am (#)
Robin:
We’re just starting to venture out into the user-generated content field at the Missouri River Regional Library. I’ve set up a Wordpress blog to solicit comments from the public on the library’s expansion (new building) plans (http://www.mrrl.org/expansion/blog). So far, response has been slow, but there have been no spammy comments submitted – I’ve not had to delete anything!
I’m hoping to expand the idea of allowing library patrons a “say” in the content on the library’s site. I especially like the idea of commentable Reader’s Advisory pages – that would be very useful for both us (as librarians) and the public. Excellent idea!