Blogs in libraries

Boy, no wonder so many people have blogs, they are so easy to set up. I'm personally not big on being "out there" on the Internet because I already have a circle of friends and family that I keep in touch with in other ways.

However, my colleagues and I have been brainstorming about how we can use blogs and other web technologies in our library. We are a 3 person staff of librarians in a clinical library at The Children's Hospital in Aurora, Colorado. The hospital is affiliated with the University of Colorado at Denver Health Sciences Center, which has its own library. Both libraries are on the same large campus, but we have a more specialized clientele who depend on our services to do their jobs, which range from direct patient care to administration, to teaching and research. We give classes in literature searching, point-of-care databases, and Endnote.

Since Children's is a teaching hospital, many of our customers are young residents and fellows. We anticipate that they will be interested in the latest technologies, so we want to try to be as much on the cutting edge as possible when they come to us. Maybe a blog will be useful if they have questions about a class or library presentation they attended, or to find out what new books we have just purchased for the collection. We already publish a quarterly newsletter about the library, so we can possible supplement the information with a blog or keep a duplicate issue as a blog.

We are also interested in the uses of blogs at other libraries, particularly university and hospital libraries. Thank you for the oopportunity to take this class!