1. Weblogs as Customer Communication & Collaboration Tools: Blogs at APL Christina K Pikas Computers in Libraries March 22, 2006

2. 2 Agenda  Our Process  Our Current Blog  Other Internal Blogs  Lessons Learned  Future Work

3. 3 Our Process: Our Environment  Centralized IT management  No library servers, techies  No lab-wide effort  We are the content people  Immediate management pro- innovation

4. 4 Our Process: Need  Need for newsletter  Intranet portal design is inflexible  Moving to all digital/online > need new communications channels

5. 5 Our Process: First Try  Librarian Proposal  Potential uses  Requirements  Suggested Software  Techie - Picked another software, that did not meet requirements

6. 6 Our Process: End of First Try  Librarian  Coded template  Created content  Marketed  No statistics  Server taken away, content backed up

7. 7 Our Process: Second Try  Head of library group found friendly techie, group to host  Purchased MT license  Librarian  Set up blogs  Created branded templates  Created marketing tools

8. 8 Current Blog  Statistics via  Apache/Webalizer (2k visits/month)  MT internal  E-mails received requesting inclusion  Linked from department pages

9. 9

10. 10 Other Internal Blogs  Mix of software hosts  Under the radar  Do not receive comments – authors get e-mail, phone calls, stopped in the hall  Do not have subscribers, mostly get traffic from search, visits

11. 11 Future Work  Topical blogs  Internal lab-wide summit for social software  Possible hosting of other department blogs  Surveys to determine other directions

12. 12 Lessons Learned  Do the best you can to get a stable host  Do not assume customers and IT know/get blogs  Back-up, consider ways to export/import posts  Lots of contact information  Get it advertised on the pages your customers visit!

13. 13 Contact Information Christina K. Pikas, BS, MLS R.E. Gibson Library & Information Center The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory Voice 443.778.4812 (Baltimore) 240.228.4812 (Washington) E-mailChristina.Pikas@jhuapl.eduChristina.Pikas@jhuapl.edu