[WEB4LIB] RE: Library blog question

[K.G. Schneider]

> And finally, for me, having notification of new entries coming via email
> would be most annoying....that's why I have a gazillion RSS feeds set up
> in my reader. But that's me. However, most people will express a
> preference for something they are already familiar with rather than an
> unknown. If we all catered to this exclusively, we'd still all have card
> catalogs. Sometimes it's good to just move along ahead of the crowd and
> have them catch up.

On this point, I agree. Here's a new service. They can read it online or
they can use an aggregator to subscribe to it. You aren't taking away an
existing service by adding this blog, and they can get to it even if they
don't want to use an aggregator. Yes, they are customers, and customers need
to be treated right... but email management requires overhead, and overhead
takes away from other services you could be providing, and overall I think
the cultural expectation of blogs is that they are read online and not
through email, so you won't lose any cred. 

You can lead them to a new service. Make it easy for them; make it fun. Make
the new tools seem like the best thing since sliced bread. I remember
introducing receipt printers to a small rural library when we went online,
and through a combination of prevarication and marketing we convinced users
that a) we couldn't check out books any other way and b) this was really a
major step up for our users. We also gave out magnets to hold the receipt
printers and pointed out they now had a list of what they had checked out. 

Karen G. Schneider
kgs at bluehighways.com