Presented during the VLACRL Conference-within-a-Conference during the Virginia Library Association Annual Conference 2011.

1. Teaching an Old Blog New Tricks: Rethinking the Subject Blog
Rebecca K. Miller, Virginia Tech
Background A Few Tricks
In May 2010, I became the College Librarian for the Department of Human Nutrition, Foods and
Exercise (HNFE). The previous College Librarian for HNFE had set high standards, and had been
very involved in research and instruction. Looking for new ways to meet this high level of service to
the department, I continued to work closely with HNFE faculty members on instruction, research,
and collection management projects, but sought out new ways to support this community. These • Use RSS feeds for dynamic
new ideas included office hours in their building (Wallace Hall) on campus, and starting a blog
geared toward research and resources specifically for this department. content; add the blog’s RSS
Why a blog? I wanted to create something new, that would be flexible, and potentially serve feed to your subject guide!
multiple purposes. I wanted to do it well, so I created guidelines for myself. First and foremost, I
developed a mission statement that would dovetail with HNFE’s departmental mission and guide
the blog’s content:
• Come up with a list of
Frequent and timely dispatches from Virginia Tech’s Newman Library for members of the Human
Nutrition, Foods and Exercise Department, supporting the mission delivering, translating, and categories (tags) that can
disseminating health-related advances in the nutrition, food, and exercise sciences.
ensure you always have
Other guidelines that I developed for the blog include: ensuring that the blog is well-designed and
aesthetically pleasing; publishing between 2 and 4 posts a week to keep the blog fresh; developing content to blog about, and help
a set of regular features in order to guide the content of the blog; using RSS feeds to pull in
authoritative information from nutrition, food and exercise related journals, websites, and blogs; readers know what to expect
publicizing the blog; gathering statistics through Google Analytics.
Since the blog’s inception in July 2010, I have worked within these guidelines and my mission with
some surprising and gratifying results! • Link back to your library, and
university, as often as possible
Features & Specifics • Consider using guest
http://hnfelibrarian.blogspot.com
contributors to help maintain a
variety of content
Available blogging platforms include WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr, and Posterous. I chose Blogger
because I was already familiar with it and knew that Google Analytics would work seamlessly with it.
I brainstormed categories of content that I would feature on the blog: • Use the blog as a tool for
• Frequently Asked Reference Questions
• Culinary History Highlight (from our collections) teaching about Web 2.0 tools,
• New Books
• Embedded Tutorials evaluating information
• Library News
• Library Issues resources, and communicating
• Technology Reviews
with social media tools
I selected the following features to add to the blog:
• Individual pages for information about me, library resources, and guest
contributors
• A blogroll where I could pull in relevant RSS feeds • Treat the blog as a resource for
• A search box so readers could search content
• Prominent placement of the “categories” or “tags” list so that readers could helping the rest of the campus
easily see the type of content
• Links to recent popular posts community understand library
• An list of archived posts
• An embedded Google Form that would allow anonymous feedback from issues
readers
• Post answers to frequently
Outcomes & Assessments asked questions in order to
Clearly, one of the major points of assessment for this blog has been Google Analytics. Installing
Google Analytics was as simple as copying and pasting the Google Analytics tracking code, and this have a handy link available
tool yielded immediate feedback about the blog and its success.
when that question comes up
However, the information available through Google Analytics—unique visitors, page views, traffic
sources, browsers used, time spent on site, most popular posts—was not the only information that I again!
used to consider the blog’s impact on the HNFE community.
In February 2011, I was able to use the blog as an instructional tool when I worked an HNFE class
entitled Communicating with Food. Particularly, I used the Information Literacy Standards for • Use the blog as a platform for
Science and Engineering/Technology to highlight two standards that could be addressed through a
blog: Standard Three and Standard Five. These two standards focus on students understanding the publishing quick tutorials (with
importance of using technology tools to (1) stay up to date with professional and scholarly advances,
and (2) appropriately and effectively communicate with a wide variety of people. Jing, Screenr, or Captivate)
Through my instruction and the assignment that I developed to go along with it, students had the showing readers how to use
opportunity to learn about both accessing and disseminating information through social media
outlets. Specifically, students had the opportunity to write a post for my blog that would be databases, citation managers,
published as part of the American Dietetic Association’s National Nutrition Month blogging festival.
These posts are still available under the tags: guest contributors and national nutrition month. Both or anything else!
the students’ performance on the project and the anecdotal evidence gathered indicated that using a
blog as an instructional tool was highly effective and assisted the instructor in helping students gain
critical information literacy skills that they will need in order to be successful in their future
professional endeavors. • Track the blog through Google
Analytics