Blogs - organisational

When I first looked at organisational blogs for my dissertation last year I could find few examples of archival organisational blogs and almost none in the UK apart from the Archives Hub. Possible reasons for this scarcity could have been a general lack of knowledge, the fact that it is harder to organise an institutional blog than it is to blog personally and organisations do not have time to blog and many are unsure of what a blog should contain or its purpose.

However, in the last year I have discovered many new organisational blogs which is encouraging as when done correctly an organisational blog can provide a secondary public face for an organisation, one that may be more accessible and less formal than the official website.

Some examples of organisational blogs include:

• Special collections at the University of Bradford
• British cartoon archive
• Harold Pinter archive
• Franklin & marshall college
• The royal society
• John Murray archive

An organisational blog gives a repository the opportunity to promote collections and provide interesting and useful information about the repository. Some organisations use their blogs to announce new accessions, an archival item of the month/week and showcase digital images.