Launching LOGIS into the Blogisphere

I’ve been sitting on the idea of starting this blog for about a year now, as a new way of providing updates on new information resources. Sending out emails and maintaining all the associated contact lists is not the most efficient way for me to use my time, and is not the best use of the kind of technology that's now available to all of us. Since blogging is increasingly a normal avenue for broadcasting information, it seems a good time to start a corporate “internal” blog. (Blogging is so normal, that coincidentally as I blog here, a large number of Libraries staff are working their way through a technology skills course that includes the requirement that they start their own blog.)

I’m making no predictions about the frequency of the posts here – there’s no point trying to define the indefinable. And, initially, I need to make some assumptions as to the kind of information people around Council would like to see or will find useful. However, I don’t intend to duplicate work already being done for you by people in your own parts of the organisation. The News section of Citynet provides plenty of access to our internal and external newsletters and the local news clippings, not to mention the Digital Library for news from the rest of the world. In addition, City Planning puts out an excellent weekly emailed newsletter “In the Planning Library this week” – contact Records in City Planning if you’d like to be added to their mailing list. It covers journal subscriptions held by the Planning Library, as well as some of the journals that I send around on distribution, and always includes a few snippets of information you might not have managed to stumble across on the Internet. Many of your teams have your own journal subscriptions or small book collections as well – all fine, given that many of those information resources are day-to-day work tools and staff want to keep these resources in their office areas. The point of difference for LOGIS is that it is a corporate library service set up within the Central public library building across the road from you all at Council, rather than within the Council building(s), as is the case with many other local government corporate libraries. That brings advantages and disadvantages for a local government corporate library service, but overall, I think the advantages far outweigh the disadvantages. The information resources and services that Council staff can rely on by extension through LOGIS being sited within a public library are huge, and not something that most corporate libraries around Auckland could provide for their users.

So this blog is intended to keep you all up-to-date on my perspective of the information world – the resources that I come across daily, that might provide Council staff with a different point of view, or expand knowledge in a direction not previously considered. The intranet pages that I maintain within Citynet will still be there, and I’ll be increasing the amount of information available electronically there as time goes by. Some of you will have noticed that TARU is now available there as a pdf file, rather than taking forever going around on distribution like the other printed journals. Faster and more efficient for you and less admin work for me. There are also some statistical resources that are online now on Citynet, and I’m going to be slowly increasing those in the future.
From the LOGIS desk.