2012 Best Practices for Government Libraries

An Online Community Is Born: NIC’s National Jail Exchange
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BEST PRACTICES 2012
By Connie Clem, Managing Editor, National Jail Exchange; Principal, Clem Information
Strategies
The National Jail Exchange (NJE) is an online journal launched in 2010 as a place for local
detention and corrections agencies to share their expertise on offender programs, agency
management strategies, and public safety and policy matters. It is produced by the
National Institute of Corrections (NIC), a small agency within the U.S. Department of
Justice and the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
The NJE is part of NIC’s interactive Corrections Community website, which complements
the agency’s main website at http://www.nicic.gov/. NIC’s main website provides
information on NIC’s training and technical assistance services and includes NIC’s online
library. The Community site has several public and private forums on topics of interest to
sectors of the corrections field, and it features a series of blogs, most of which are written
by NIC staff. The NJE is one of these blogs. The Corrections Community homepage
address is http://community.nicic.gov/.
NIC was created by the U.S. Congress in 1974 as a federal center that would assist in the
development of higher levels of professionalism and effectiveness in federal, state, and
local corrections agency operations and leadership. It accomplishes this goal through
training programs, research, on-site consultation in areas ranging from facility planning to
justice policy assessment, and professional communities of practice to share information
on what works.
The NJE supports this information-sharing mission. The online journal is presented in a
blog format. Articles are added to the journal at a rate of about one article per month. The
NJE homepage, http://nicic.gov/NationalJailExchange, displays the title of each article
along with the first few lines of its description, plus a count of downloads. The display can
be sorted by date, number of views, or number of comments. Clicking through on a title
takes the viewer to an introductory page for the article, which includes author credits, an
article summary, and a link to the full article in PDF format, designed with consistent NJE
branding. Readers are invited to comment on and rate the usefulness of NJE articles.
Any agency can contribute an article. To date, however, most articles have been written
at the invitation of NIC. A virtual editorial team discusses topic ideas and news on
agencies that are doing innovative work, and the managing editor asks an agency contact
if they’d like to write an article. Writing for the NJE is an opportunity to share expertise
and gain visibility for the accomplishments of agencies and their staff, so agencies often
agree to submit a piece. Articles may address topics such as an agency’s experience with
new security technology, a community partnership, or a program intervention that helps
change lives and reduces taxpayer costs by keeping people out of jail. Some articles are
“e-reprints” of pieces from other publications in the corrections field that are not formally
published online. This helps to expand the audience for a variety of useful, practical
information that improves agency performance.