Library Hacks is a place to find out about tools, resources, services, and ideas that can help make your research and the library more efficient for you. It’s written mostly by Duke Libraries staff, but we’ll also have occasional student and faculty guest bloggers. (Want to be one? Let us know!)
Our inspirations are blogs like LifeHacker, LifeHack, AcademHack, and ParentHacks, and book series like O’Reilly’s Hacks Series.
I think this is a great way to draw in users that may not already be a part of the library's normal audience. I am a believer in "bridging" the gap between non-users and the library using social software because of its low commitment level. The readers of this blog may already know about the library. But, they may have simply done a search on audiobooks, or multiple-computer productivity, and found that there is someone at the library writing about how to deal those sorts of problems.
And it may stop there. Read the post, move on. But some may read it, see that it is from the library and then come back for more information, or look at some of the other library resources that are linked to on the blog's home page.
The problem with this model is that this is most likely not going to be the first blog a library produces. That may need to be modeled more around news and library programming. In that instance, however, posts along these lines could be sprinkled in, just to add a little spice to the normal fodder.
I found the Library Hacks to be a very professional and very informative.I had a look at the other blogs too which the Duke's say is their inspiration.I think Duke's has done a great job in matching upto them.
ReplyDeleteGreat choice Dan!
Nice choice. I like the amount of information provided and the layout of the page. There was also a good amount of feedback to the posts.
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