One of my goals for the coming year is to implement a new internal blog for the McGill Libraries, a space that will make it easy for news and information to be shared within and between the different branches and units that make up the Library.

We currently have a staff blog that is running on a WordPress installation administered by central IT. The blog is private, meaning that you have to login and be authenticate as a member of the Library staff to be able to access the blog.

The requirement to keep the information private makes it harder to share the information and get it out to everyone who needs to see it. RSS is essentially useless, since you can’t authenticate with popular newsreaders such as Google Reader. Yes, there is a proposed workaround with Internet Explorer and Outlook that on paper seems to allow you to subscribe to an RSS feed that requires authentication, but in my experience, the setup process is very cumbersome and doesn’t really work anyway.

To get around this, every Monday I manually compose and send out an email digest of new posts to the staff blog. Here again, the need for privacy gets in the way. I always include direct links to articles in my email message. However, when a user clicks on the link they are prompted to login, at which point they are taken to the home page and not the blog post they were interested in.

Before I start to dig into this problem, I though I would ask for advice/pointers from other folks who have tackled this problem to narrow down my field of research. Have you implemented internal blogs and how have you addressed the RSS/authentication issue?

This morning I had a meeting with some of the folks who are behind the Library’s blogs. I had called the meeting so that people could check in on how their blogging efforts were going and to provide input/feedback on how they would like to see our blogging platform evolve.

Here were my take away points from the meeting:

• Access to analytics is very important to everyone, since aside from comments, usage statistics are the primary means of giving you a measure of how successful your blogging efforts are. We should be able to deliver this quite soon.
• Comments need to be opened up to non-McGill users, including support for anonymous users. We also need to ability to specify that some kinds of comments (for example, comments from McGill users) appear on the site without moderation. Start from a position of trust and work out from there. We need to make sure we have automated spam detection in place, and do a few walk-throughs to make sure that the commenting and comment moderation process is as easy to use as possible. But given that we’re running WordPress, I don’t see any problems with making this happen. My main concern will be helping bloggers to develop their comment moderating skills.
• Bloggers need to be able to post their own audio and video content to their blog. Right now people can embed YouTube videos, but need a way to get their own media content on the web. This is mostly a space issue, but we’re hoping to be making headway on that shortly as part of our server environment upgrade that we’re working on.
• Bloggers want to be able to control as much of their blog’s settings as possible. This is not unexpected, and we will be opening up control as much as we can with the exception of the visual design of the blogs as well as admin-level options that if opened risk creating support headaches for my team.
• The redesign of the visual template is less important that I expected. Well, less important than the issues I’ve listed above. This does make some sense, though, since of the items listed here the visual design of the blog is probably the element that has the least amount of impact on a person’s ability to blog effectively.

We also spent some time talking about how we could go about promoting the Library blogs and generated a lot of good ideas for me to consider. We have developed a RSS feed widget that people will be able to use to display recent posts from their blogs off pages on the Library’s main web site, making it easier for our community to discover the Library’s blogs. We’re just waiting for McGill IT to complete their review of our code so that it can be moved into production. I’ll be sure to share the news here once these widgets start to appear on our site!

Overall it was a good meeting, although I was slightly disappointed by the low turnout. That, along with a few comments that were made, make me wonder if maybe I need to reconsider how I should support our librarian bloggers. Maybe I’m trying to do too much, when really they just want me to provide the blogging platform and get out of the way? While I don’t think that is the best approach, I can’t ignore that my users most likely have a very different perspective on what kind of support they need, and I have to give that serious consideration if I want to make the most of the resources we allocate to this.