Louise Alcorn, Reference Technology Librarian at West Des Moines Public LIbrary, always does a great job—seh's thorough, shows many examples, is very practical, and can give you all the nitty-gritty you need for doing...whatever!.
Of course, I’m going to look at it from the Library 2.0 / social perspective, and blogs are an easy way for a library to get started—and with Blogger, it’s free! Louise pointed out all the reasons to have a blog. The conversation and PR aspects are the key pieces (for me) of what Louise discussed. The style is more conversational; it's easily updated; you can “feed” the blog info to your users on your website—or to their disktop in an aggregator; comments allow you to interact with your readers. Don’t be afraid of comment! Uusers self-censor, and other users will “police” others; Ann Arbot DL has had over 4,000 comments and nly one or two inappropriate words—and other users said, “No, we don’t do hits on the blog.” If the comments are negative or critical you have a chance to respod and talk with users immediately, rather than having those comments out in the community and you don’t hear about them until damage has been done. Blogs build an online community in a way that a static website can't. You allow users to come and talk to you in their comfort zone, in their space
The thing libraries should fear about blogging, I think, is success! It’s important that you keep the blog up to date, and allow that conversation with your users. Then the sky is pretty much the limit—and even that is becoming less limiting as technology advances and more options become available on these free services such as Blogger. Let people comment, talk to your users, let your staff talk to your users in a blog. The library is theirs, after all. Converse with others in the community, let them know what you’re doing with their taxes. Let them talk with you.
RSS can be used to bring information from blogs directly to your desktop (using an aggregator) or to republish on a website. This has many uses for a library--library news items, new books, calendars...all can be delivered to your users' desktops, or "plugged into" the library website. We use several feeds (or sometimes widgets, really, but close enough for our purposes) on the SWILSA website: our Sites of the Week, the rolling 30 day calendar, and the photos of our member libraries are all "fed" to the website from other blogs or sites. It keeps your website fresh without having to continually update the page manually.
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