Last night I was a  panellist at an ALIA Queensland event on blogging for library and information professionals. My co-panellists were Alisa Howlett (www.acrystelle.com) and Amy Walduck (Pineapple Glam), and the session was chaired by Michelle Hughes.

The event was streamed on Facebook Live and is available to watch if you missed it last night. My raw notes for the event are below. Not all of these thoughts made it into the panel discussion, which was a lot more free-range!



My main takeaway from the event is that there is no one 'right' way to approach blogging. Although the three of us had similar motivations for blogging (sharing with others, contributing to professional discourse, maintaining a credible online presence), the platforms we used, the ways we come up with ideas, our writing styles, and our processes from inspiration through to a final product were all totally different.

The panel discussion is making me re-think my own blog and plan some improvements to it, including possibly moving to another platform, re-theming, paying more attention to visual communication (thanks, Amy!) and considering ways to highlight popular or curated posts better (thanks, Alisa!)

Tell us about your blog - is it professional or personal?

Mostly professional, though over time I have probably started to provide a more personal take on professional issues.

I know from feedback from readers that posts that I felt were verging on the too-personal have actually resonated the most. By nature I am a private person, so sharing thoughts about things like impostor syndrome, the negative impacts of being a perfectionist, and being ambivalent about stepping into a management role does not come easily. However the thoughts and feelings that I have shared reflect my experience of the complexity of professional life as a librarian in the 21st century, and having people respond with recognition and empathy has helped me to become more comfortable with opening up in that way.

Reasons for blogging and what you hope to get out of it?

I had actually forgotten this before I started preparing for the panel, but I started regular blogging for a work project well before I had my own blog. The funding agency required the project to communicate and it was free and easy to set up a Blogger blog to do that. The project team collectively wrote thirteen posts over about a year.

Once I had jumped into blogging I realised that it was a great way to write regular shorter pieces on topics that were of interest to me and hopefully others. I liked the immediacy and the non-scholarly nature of it, which made it easier to present more provocative or ambiguous viewpoints.

Do you set goals for how much time you dedicate?

I don’t have specific goals around writing time but I do include a blog writing goal in my performance plan with my supervisor. For the past two years my goal has been to write six posts a year so it is not a particularly hard one to achieve.

I participated in #blogjune for a couple of years, where the goal was to write a blog post a day for the month of June. It is intense but fun! I did write a post a day one year and a post a week the following year. Now I just stick to my own not-very-regular schedule.

I have been along to the ALIA Shut Up and Write sessions and used some of those for blogging. It was great to have some external impetus!

It’s probably important to note that there is also non-writing work involved in maintaining a blog, such as:

• Sourcing images (with appropriate licences for re-use, of course!)
• Setting up and renewing your domain name
• Responding to comments (including dealing with spam, which is mostly filtered but not always)
• Keeping static pages up to date and fixing broken links. 

Do you have a specific theme/subject you stick to?

Most of my posts are about career or professional development issues of one kind or another.

I sometimes use the NewCardigan Glam Blog Club theme as a starter.

At times I’ve used my blog for a 'behind the scenes' look at other people’s jobs. I find it really fun to do Q&As with colleagues that have jobs that are maybe a bit mysterious to other people. When research data management was still emerging, I did a couple of Q&As on that. Last year I did another series featuring colleagues of mine that include non-coding IT skills as part of their professional practice.

I’ve also used my blog as a place to publish submissions that I have made on industry issues, such as ALIA’s publishing strategy consultation and a letter to my MP about the de-funding of Trove.

I also often include references to further reading. Sometimes I wonder if a bibliography is unnecessarily nerdy, but a lot of my ideas for writing come from what I'm reading. Sometimes I like to review or reflect on the literature in a bit more depth, rather than just sharing a link on Twitter. Acknowledging that inspiration and encouraging others to do more professional reading is something I am always happy to do.

How do you keep motivated to write?

I don’t have to try that hard to stay motivated. I usually enjoy the writing and editing process. Unlike more academic publishing you also get the satisfaction of hitting the ‘publish’ button yourself when you are done and not having to wait months and months to see it appear in a journal.

I don’t really force myself to write now if I don’t feel I have something to say that people would be interested in. I would rather write fewer more substantive pieces on things that I hope will really resonate with people.

How do you attract people to read your blog?

I usually include the web address for my blog in my biography for events and publications and in my social media profiles.

Twitter is the main channel I use to promote specific posts. Three quarters of the traffic to my blog comes directly from Twitter. I also sometime link to my posts on LinkedIn.

I am pretty sure a significant amount of my Twitter traffic comes from the Aus GLAM Blog Bot, which autotweets my new posts several times on the day of publication. One thing that I have noticed is that the time of publication makes a difference to the size of the audience, so having a notification go out a few times at different times of the day really helps.

I try to provide reasonably descriptive titles. Looking at the stats for my blog, I can definitely see that a more provocative headline draws people in.

I’m not much of a visual communicator, but I do try to include at least one image in each post to make it more visually interesting.

Has blogging improved and made you feel more confident in your writing and is it a completely different style?

I’ve always enjoyed writing and I did a journalism major as part of my first degree. Although I realised quickly that journalism wasn’t going to be a career path for me, news writing training provided me with a good grounding in non-academic writing.

I’ve also done writing-for-the-web training with different employers, and that’s been helpful too. I would recommend writing-for-the-web training for anyone in the library sector as the principles will make all your writing better.

Blogging is different from other professional writing that I do. Scholarly writing requires a lot more time and a lot more effort to comply with style guides, referencing systems, and the general requirements such as including a literature review. If I am submitting to a journal or conference proceedings, I would usually run a draft past a writing mentor or peer reader when doing that kind of writing, as the standard is very high.

I also have to do a lot of business writing at work e.g. reports and project documents. There are a lot of similarities between blogging and that kind of writing, in terms of keeping paragraphs short, using plain English, and making use of headings and bullet points to structure your writing for easy reading by busy people.

Any interesting connections or opportunities that have come out of a blog post you wrote?

Last year I published a series of posts based on a presentation that I gave at the New Librarians Symposium. One of the things I showcased in that series was the Skills Framework for the Information Age (SFIA), a widely-used IT competency framework.

I received an email from one of the senior people at the SFIA Foundation saying that they found my application of SFIA to the library world interesting to read. As a result of that series of posts, I also had a number of students and recent graduates get in touch with me via Twitter, which was really gratifying and expanded my Twitter network quite a bit.

What tips would you give to someone who is wanting to start a blog?

I would encourage anyone starting out to think more about the audience than about yourself. Rather than thinking about writing as self-expression (what do I want to say?), think about what your audience needs or wants, and what new or interesting perspective you can bring that no-one else is currently providing.

You could try guest blogging or writing short pieces for newsletters like ALIA's InCite first to get a feel for the effort that is required. It is also possible to publish pieces via LinkedIn now; this could be a good way to get started on a smaller scale with your existing professional network.

Always be ethical and professional and make it explicit somewhere on your site that your views do not represent those of your employer. Being aware of any formal social media policies that your organisation may have is really important, as these policies can differ quite a bit depending on where you work.

One of the things I've done today is write a short piece on data journals (reproduced in its entirety below) for our Information Services (INS) online newsletter, INSight. 

INSight is published monthly by our division's Communications team; all university staff receive it as an email as well as being able to access it via the web. As a channel, I've found it a really useful way to get important updates about data management out to a big chunk of the university community. Through the magic of web analytics, we know that INSight is opened by almost 50% of the people who receive it; this is far above the 'open rate' of around 20% for newsletters like this, which is a testament to our Comms team's expertise and hard work. (Be kind to your Comms people because they can do things that you might find difficult, like source professional images to accompany stories and write snappy headlines that make people actually want to read your stories about data management rather than poke their own eyes out.)

Research data advocacy is a never-ending task, so I always look for opportunities to get word out through as many channels as possible using the least amount of resources. This single piece of content has now been repurposed in at least four different ways. 

1. Initially I decided to send an email to the team leaders of two of our Academic Services Groups (Health and Sciences) within Library and Learning Services about the release of the new data journal from Nature.
2. I did this knowing that these team leaders regularly make written and verbal reports to meetings of the Group Boards (senior management of the faculties), and asked them to include this in their reports. On reflection, I realised that many researchers might be unaware of the emergence of data journals. I re-wrote my initial email to include more contextual information and links to key resources, such as a list of available data journals and an ANDS guide. 
3. By broadening the scope of the story in this way, it then become a piece suitable for inclusion in INSight for all university staff. 
4. And here it is again on this blog, for the small but passionate crowd interested in the point where data and libraries meet. 

Do you make the most of the content that you write by re-purposing it for different outlets and audiences? Are you aware of all the channels that are available in your organisation, and do you have good relationships with the editors/owners of those outlets? If not, I highly recommend this as a sanity-saving strategy.

Data journals represent an exciting new trend in scholarly publishing and provide an opportunity for researchers to formally publish (and potentially be rewarded) for their research data outputs. While traditional journals often include datasets only as supplementary materials, data journals focus on research datasets as important outputs that can be re-used and cited in their own right.

In 2012-2013, the Peer Review for Publication & Accreditation of Research Data in the Earth Sciences (PREPARDE) project collated a list of around thirty data journals across a range of disciplines, mostly in the sciences.

The most recent data journal to be launched comes from the well-known Nature Publishing Group. Scientific Data is an open-access, peer-reviewed outlet for articles that describe important scientific datasets. These articles, called data descriptors, are described as “a new category of publication designed to provide detailed descriptions of experimental, observational, computational or curated data." Scientific Data does not host the datasets, which must be submitted to an appropriate external repository. Approximately sixty data repositories in life sciences, biomedicine and environmental sciences are currently recommended and this is likely to expand in future. The FAQs provide more information about submission and peer review processes, publication charges, and licensing options.

Data journals have different policies and requirements for submission, review, and data hosting. INS can help researchers identify data journals that might be suitable, and can provide advice on institutional and discipline repository options. To find out more about data journals, contact the Library Specialists for your academic group.

The Australian National Data Service (ANDS) also has a useful Data Journals Guide for researchers and information managers.

The Public Library of Science (PLOS) recently announced some changes to its data policy that immediately affected authors submitting manuscripts to any of the PLOS suite of high profile journals. From 1 March 2014, authors must submit a data availability statement. Unless exceptional circumstances apply, the data that supports the findings in an article must be made publicly available under conditions no more restrictive than a Creative Commons Attribution licence (CC-BY).

I don't intend to discuss the mixed responses that the PLOS announcement generated: Carly Strasser's blog post, Lit Review: #PLOSFail and Data Sharing Drama, provides an excellent overview if you are interested in this. Rather, I want to talk about how this policy change represents an opportunity to raise awareness amongst researchers of institutional infrastructure (such as repositories that can be used to publish data) and advisory services.

When I first read the announcement, my initial thought was that I needed to find out which Griffith researchers had already published in PLOS (on the assumption that if they've been published there before they might try there again). I wasn't sure of the extent to which our researchers may have targeted PLOS previously and following on from that, what the likely impact of the PLOS changes would be at our institution.

It turns out that PLOS is a significant publisher of Griffith research. Over the time period since 2000 (when PLOS began), more than 200 Griffith-affiliated authors published more than 200 papers in PLOS journals. This represents about 2.3% of the Griffith journal articles published in that time period; PLOSOne was the journal with the fourth highest number of articles by Griffith researchers. This was far more than I was expecting! On an annual basis, this could translate into a pretty substantial number of supplementary datasets that need to be made openly available as per the policy. Even if our researchers are depositing elsewhere in subject repositories (which seems likely, given the subject areas the PLOS journals cover), we'd still like to be capturing metadata for them locally so that they appear in researcher profiles in the Griffith Research Hub and can be harvested by our national registry, Research Data Australia.

I've been thinking that a 1-2 pager (possibly accompanied by the PLOS FAQs) on what this means for Griffith researchers could be prepared quite quickly. This could go out to the Research Committee meetings of our four Academic Groups (particularly the Health and Science groups), to the directors and managers of our research centres and institutes by email, and to the research community as a whole through our Information Services newsletter and university-wide fortnightly Griffith News email. It would be good to work on this in partnership with our Office for Research and we'd probably need to cover:

• what the changes are
• how those changes will directly affect researchers, and
• what relevant support the University has in place, including institutional repositories and Digital Object Identifier (DOI) minting, and advice on subject repositories.

One of the things I'm not sure about is whether to focus just on the PLOS changes or more generally on journal policies for data sharing. Our team (eResearch Services) has already been contacted by a researcher from our Institute for Glycomics about the policy change at PLOS. Coincidentally, only a week later a similar request came through from a researcher in another institute targeting a Nature Publishing Group journal. Like PLOS, NPG's data policy has significantly changed in recent times. At Griffith far fewer researchers have published in NPG journals than in PLOS journals (about a quarter of the number noted above) but maybe it still warrants a mention? Or should we be looking at the overall findings of the JISC-funded Journal Research Data Policies Project (JoRD) and coming up with a broader message for researchers around shifts in the publishing industry, rather than focusing on specific journals?

It seems likely that these policy changes will spark new conversations with some of our top researchers. How is your institution responding to these policy changes by the publishers? Will you highlight these changes through direct communication with your researchers, or will you respond on demand as researchers become aware of new requirements at the time they are submitting? Do you think there is greater benefit in highlighting the policy changes of specific journals, or in promoting more general trends in scholarly publishing, including the emergence of data journals? I'd love to hear how others plan to respond.