Librarian in Black Blog – Sarah Houghton-Jan

Social Media Governance offers a database of Social Media Policies, a selection of corporate and government agency policies regulating their staff use of social networks, the internet in general, email, and more.  There are also policies meant for their website’s users, such as commenting policies. These literally run the entire spectrum from the overly-restrictive and horribly unrealistically impractical to the open and modern policies we’re used to seeing in libraries.

And on that note, if you really want a look at a policy for staff that might be a good starting place for your own staff policy, take a look at the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s “How to Blog Safely (About Work or Anything Else).”

Then again, there are hundreds of libraries out there too, with similar policies that are specifically written for a library environment.  So look at those too   There are hundreds of examples of blog/comment/Facebook policies meant for the public’s use, and even more governing staff’s use…sadly, most of those are hidden behind intranet walls.  A few have been posted as part of presentations or PowerPoints, so you can look for those with simple web searches too.  The important thing is to keep it brief & direct–be general instead of trying to figure out every possible eventuality and problem.  Take my own blog policy as an example:

No spam, personal attacks, or rude or intolerant comments.

Comments need to actually relate to the blog post topic.

Easy right?