Guest Blog: UKOLN’s support services
I’m delighted to introduce the first in a series of guest blogs from friends and colleagues who work with the sector to explore innovative uses of technology. Please welcome Marieke Guy, who blogs regularly for UKOLN.
Marieke is a research officer in the Community and Outreach Team at UKOLN, a centre of excellence in digital information management, based at the University of Bath. UKOLN provide advice and services to the library, information and cultural heritage communities. Marieke is a regular Twitterer (http://twitter.com/mariekeguy) and can be emailed using m.guy@ukoln.ac.uk.
Starting Out
The UKOLN Cultural Heritage blog
(http://blogs.ukoln.ac.uk/cultural-heritage/) was established in December 2008 with the first post going live on January 1st 2009. Its intention was (and is) to compliment UKOLN’s work in the Cultural Heritage sector. Its aim being to provide a forum for dissemination, discussion and debate related to innovation and the networked environment.
At the time the UKOLN Web site had just had a revamp, which enabled us to create a new cultural heritage area (http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/cultural-heritage/). This area now includes briefing documents in the form of ‘IntroBytes’, events information, bookshelf – a selection of book titles that have been identified as being useful, information on the best blogs, mailing lists, social networks and e-journals out there. A blog seemed to be the missing component.
It was agreed that a team blog would be the easiest approach and so myself, Ann Chapman and Brian Kelly started posting.
The blog is aimed primarily at practitioners and policy-makers in the UK’s cultural heritage sector. At the onset we committed ourselves to publishing a regular series of posts, with ideally at least one post per week. We also wanted to be able to publish guest blog posts, in which members of the cultural heritage sector can provide views from their own perspective. We have been very successful at this and have managed to post 75 posts over the last 10 months!
Moving On
Many of the posts are regular updates on the cultural heritage work we are carrying out, for example after events we’ve presented at we like to post slides and videos on the blog. There are also posts on other relevant cultural heritage events attended by the team. Every month there is a post entitled ‘elsewhere on UKOLN blogs’ which links to other interesting posts. Both myself and Brian Kelly have our own blogs (Brian writes the very popular UK Web Focus http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/ and I write about my experiences of working from home on my Ramblings of a Remote Worker blog http://remoteworker.wordpress.com/), we are also often contributors on UKOLN project blogs and there is a fair amount of cross over.
Through the blog we also hope to provide a key communication channel for engagement with the cultural heritage sector by encouraging discussion and debate on innovation and best practices. Interesting topics include accessibility, library use of Twitter, museum blogs, the Digital Britain report, Google Wave and ‘Why are Library Websites so Dull?’
We have also had some great guest blog posts like the one on the Text a librarian service at Huddersfield (http://blogs.ukoln.ac.uk/cultural-heritage/2009/10/12/text-a-librarian-at-huddersfield-university-library/), Nick Moyes post on When Peregrines Come To Town
(http://blogs.ukoln.ac.uk/cultural-heritage/2009/05/18/when-peregrines-come-to-town/)
and Catriona Cardie’s take on the black art of blogging (http://blogs.ukoln.ac.uk/cultural-heritage/2009/01/12/the-black-art-of-blogging/).
Blogs are now an essential dissemination vehicle for UKOLN and are starting to be an important dissemination vehicle for the cultural heritage sector. Not only that but they are a great way to engage with a community. UKOLN hopes to do much more blogging in the future and would appreciate hearing any comments or suggestions you have.
December 13th, 2009 at 9:22 am
Check out Dulwich OnView - http://dulwichonview.org.uk/ a blog that is run by a team of volunteers from the local community around Dulwich Picture Gallery in South London. The blogs are sometimes by Gallery staff but mainly by members of the public and are about the Gallery and ALSO the arts, culture, events, history, people and eccentricities in the local community. Being independently run, it is more believable than inhouse blogs - and a lot more interesting to the wider public too. Dulwich OnView is discovered by people not looking for (and perhaps not knowing about) Dulwich Picture Gallery (analysis of search terms), who then click through to the DPG website via the many links. We think this model is unique….