NYPL Labs

Bootstrapping off of Jay’s previous post, I want to mark this with a bit more pomp and fanfare, and provide a bit of context. The short version, though, is that the NYPL’s now officially blogging.

It’s been a bit of a long road getting here - for years, the Library’s had various internal mechanisms for publishing staff content. Our intranet site (called LAIR, appropriately continuing the lion references that pervade our systems) contains custom-built CMS modules that well predate the rise of blogging software, and Lotus Notes can be wrestled into blog-like behavior.

A bit less than a year ago, though, our Information Technology Group decided to kick the tires of Wordpress-MU as a potential platform for distributed blogging. It was installed inside our firewall, and grew by word of mouth for the better part of a year, attracting a core group of maybe 25-30 self-selected bloggers who’re using it to talk about their work at NYPL and share information (more on this in a subsequent post). A few weeks ago, our Office of Staff Development ran the first staff training on internal blogging, and will be repeating it a number of times in the near future.

While watching this, we started to think about how to use the concept of a blog strategically, to further the Library’s overall mission of serving the public. The first pilot consisted of a series of standalone Wordpress installations on beta.nypl.org, each focusing on a single topic (some written by individual authors, some by groups). These flourished for a month or two, then the project lost steam as our attention turned toward the redesign of both nypl.org (which went live in November) and the Digital Gallery (coming soon).

Somehow, though, a number of the initial crop of bloggers persevered, and a few others began piloting their own blogs, mostly on the internal Wordpress-MU installation. When we recircled the wagons over the winter holiday, a new idea emerged; rather than bunch of standalone blogs, maybe the better idea was to have one big blog in all its cacophonous glory, treating it as a container into which any public-facing staff member could toss a post, tagging it with whatever subjects seemed relevant. This would give us the flexibility to let individuals write from their expertise, which might cut across easy distinctions of subject, location, or organizational division. The key insight here was that the important thing wasn’t the blog, but the post - rather than thinking in terms of siloed blogs, we’d have authors focus on “posts”, presenting those posts in different configurations (including the streams that we’re used to thinking of as “blogs).

Conveniently, we’d also made the decision to move toward Drupal as a CMS for our next-gen public site, and the Ann Arbor District Library offered one initial model for how to connect all the pieces. For the moment, this content is only available under http://nypl.org/blog/, but we’ll be working them into the experience of nypl.org elsewhere on the site starting later this year (and down the road, we hope to experiment with using them to supplement both the discovery process and search algorithms).

The next steps for us are scaling up, and increasing the diversity of voices in this new channel. We’re figuring this out as we go, and so things like comment policies and genre conventions will emerge over time; in the meantime, we’re thrilled to enable our staff to reach out in this new way, and are eager to see where it leads.