Interview Summary: WordPress

Technology: WordPress

Context: As a tool for promotion of library resources and communication between librarians and patrons
Audience: Adult and teen patrons of libraries

During the past week, I interviewed two student employees who are working or were responsible for the update of jobs blog by utilizing WordPress for the School of Library and Information Science of UW-Madison. My interviews mainly focused on two parts: the feelings about using WordPress, and the comparison between WordPress and newer social networks such as Twitter and Facebook in the promotion of Library information. In the interviews, both of them provided me with plenty of valid and practical experience and direct feelings based on their own work stories.

About WordPress, both of my interviewees regard it as a good library tool, especially as a “virtual bulletin board” because it’s a simple platform with simple ways to input metadata. Moreover, with a great tagging function, it's searchable for users and easy to navigate. Another interesting and convenient function they introduced to me was that WordPress enables its users to create settings to get postings in their email, which could save a lot of time that were supposed to spent in filtering tons of other junk information when using Facebook or Twitter.

However, they also mentioned that WordPress is more of a blog format rather than a social media format. It provides long blog posts with detail information, which at most time, would make people choose platforms with simpler and clearer massages instead. Hence, it would get less viewers than social networks and probably would be not “hip enough” to attract young adults and teenager patrons. WordPress would be regarded as an academic information platform rather than a popular social network. Since it’s too detail and doesn't have any sense of followers or people liking it, it might be not necessary to promote library resources via WordPress.

One of the interviews was in person and took place on April 4^th, 2014 and the other was conducted via email on April 5^th, 2014.