Good Blogging Practices

The primary use for our blog is to foster and collect discussion on class-related topics. Please remember that this blog space is public. In other words, while I want you to feel comfortable to initiate and facilitate great discussions here, this blog is a public performance space where we still need to be committed to some good practices. So I’d like to pose the following “good practices” to guide us:

1. Title your posts to give your readers context.

2. Aim for clarity and specificity in your posts and comments. This may include providing details to remind each other of what archival problem you are solving. You may also need to clearly state your main points up front as a way of helping your readers to follow your thought process. Finally, if you're commenting on one portion of someone else’s post, it might help to copy/paste that portion for others to see.

3. Follow civil/civic discussion practices, even if it seems like our discussion topics are fairly benign. Remember that the aim of our discussions is to exchange ideas and promote understanding by explaining those ideas. In one sense, this is like diplomacy. Aggression, exclusionary language, inside jokes, or similar tactics cause others to feel marginalized and will shut down conversation or make any blog discussion a waste of time.

4. Follow good attribution practices. If you refer to a something we haven’t read, please provide us with either the full citation so we can find it ourselves. Or if you're mentioning a web source or an artifact, provide us with a hyperlink allowing us to access the document, or mention the call number (if you have it) of the related artifact at the Lilly.

5. Remember that technology is fallible. You may want to compose your post in Microsoft Word so that it is saved, before pasting it into the blog. However, once pasted in, you can check the format of your post by clicking the "compose" tab at the top of your text box in Blogger. This will allow you to reformat the font and size so that they remain consistent. Alternatively, you may want to "save as draft" frequently while you're typing directly into the compose screen on blogger.

-Dr. Graban