• The ability to delete or edit other member's postings may be important depending on what types of blog news items are included in your blogging policies.

• Major system outages, e.g. when the printer server goes down, or when a major database such as Proquest or Ebsco is down for more than a few hours. We found that posting short term or intermittent database problems was too difficult to keep up-to-date, especially when outages span more than one reference shift. Or when it gets really busy!
• Reminders about our no food or drink policies at the computer workstations.
• Changes to library hours, e.g. extended study hours at the end of the semester.
• Welcome back messages at the beginning of each semester.
• Promotion of library services such as ILL and circulating laptops program.

• Potsdam has a College Libraries News blog where we also post timely information about database problems.
  • The Ref Pod Blog is only available to users at the 16 Crumb Reference workstations.
  • The College Libraries News blog is available to everyone, everywhere from the Library home page.
  • Reference librarians have to remember to keep both blogs in sync regarding the same database problems.

• We agreed during a Reference Committee meeting that it wasn't necessary to archive all postings.  It can be very confusing to patrons to see that a database is up in one posting, but down in an earlier posting and have both postings displaying on the active desktop. We found it better to just delete the early posting or to change its posting to "draft" so that it does not display.
• When the network goes down, or the web server fails, posting to the blog doesn't work.
• Not all users read the Active Desktop, so we continue to post signage about major printer and system outages.
• Make sure to post something/anything on a fairly regular basis, else users will begin to ignore the active desktop contents.

• Not everyone needs to understand how to create an active desktop or RSS feed.
• The only thing everyone who does reference needs to know is how to create and edit a blog entry.
• Only systems managers need to know how to create and manage the blog site, create the active desktop, code for RSS feeds, etc. Once the service is set up, it doesn't require any maintenance.

• April 2005, Jenica Rogers did general session for library faculty on blogging and webfeeds: http://www2.potsdam.edu/rogersjp/blogsandfeeds.ppt
• May 2005, Marianne Hebert did a hands-on session on the Ref Pod Blog idea, and gave everyone practice space using a test blog. All reference librarians were invited to become members of the Ref Pod Blog.

• The Ref Pod workstations are managed by IT staff in the same way that PCs in the computer labs on campus are managed, that is, they use ghosting software to push a configuration image to each workstation over the campus network.  Every PC is cloned from the master image PC.  The active desktop configuration is included in the basic image for the Ref Pod computers.
• IT staff were very accomodating when we requested that the Maricopa Community College Feed2JS software be installed on our campus web server.

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