PLA Blog

I’m sitting in Logan Airport in Boston, partaking of airport wifi (free for Comcast customers, $7.95 for 24 hours) waiting to get on a plane at 10:10a to replace my delayed 6a flight. Conference bloggers for the PLA Blog will begin landing in San Antonio today, offering our readers blogged coverage of the event.

For a list of conference bloggers writing for us in San Antonio, check out the ALA Midwinter 2006 archive page. As you can see, the introductory posts from our roving writers have already started to appear on the blog.

Where do we get our conference bloggers, anyway? And how do we wrangle them at huge conferences? After blogging two large ALA conferences as well as several PLA programs over the past year, we’ve learned a great deal, and formed a semblance of a system out of our best practices.

Recruitment
Several calls for conference bloggers are always posted on the PLA Blog, but we also try to put feelers out on listservs and through word-of-mouth marketing. Ideally, we prefer public librarians, but we won’t turn away other librarians who want to take a stab at writing for us, as long as they cover programs of specific interest to public librarians.

Blogging experience is not required to blog for PLA, although some understanding of what blogging is does help. As you read in the next section, we do our best to train our bloggers before we get to the conference, and answer any questions they might have along the way. We like to think of conference blogging for the PLA Blog as a good way to get uninitiated librarians intimately acquainted with the concept. It is a bit of trial-by-fire, but we do our best to make it fun.

Organization
Once we’ve recruited a crew of bloggers, my job as the Blogger Coordinator is set up the bloggers and make sure they have everything they need. The first step is to send each blogger login information to the PLA Blog Wiki.

Using a JotSpot Wiki (donated by our sponsor JotSpot), we are able to provide information to our bloggers pre-conference.

In the wiki, we post style and content guidelines, and while our guidelines aren’t very strict, we do have rules, such as not posting about vendors (unless it’s extremely pertinent to the overall message of the post), and simple text and picture formatting rules.

We also utilize a bulletin board application within the wiki as a space for virtual introductions, answering questions, and posting necessary information in a timely fashion for the conference bloggers.

Tags: ALAMidwinter2006, blogging, conferences, PLA

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