Keeping Track of Library Bloggers
Posted by Brian Kelly on June 12th, 2010
More library bloggers is a good thing – unless you are trying to keep track of them. Within UKOLN’s Cultural Heritage Web pages we’ve steered a middle course. There’s the Best Of … Blogs section, where we’ve identified some exemplars of people writing for the sector. We also put up a Blogs Directory but even though we limited ourselves to only including LIS blogs that focus on using Web 2.0, this involves quite a lot of work to keep up to date, making sure the blogs are still there and looking out for new ones.
I see that CILIP News Editor Matthew Mezey has been faced with the same issue, as he noted in CILIP Update, Dec. 2009, p.9. He had created a Web page with a list of LIS blogs which was getting out of date but a query to Twitter provided details of lists already being maintained by other people – so he has retired his own list. So which lists are out there? Well, thanks to Matthew I now know there’s Dave’s Hotstuff 2.0 ‘keeping track of what’s cooking in the biblioblogosphere’, Jennie Findlay’s uklibraryblogs, LIS wiki‘s weblogs page and the Blogging Libraries Wiki.
And what will we do about our blog directory? We could leave the page there and add a ‘caveat emptor’ note to say it’s not being maintained. We could remove the page altogether but what if people have bookmarked it? If we do remove the page, should we preserve a copy of the database behind the page? But before we do any of this, we’d appreciate some feedback. So, how helpful have you found it?
June 14th, 2010 at 10:09 am
I wondered if you are only interested in blogs from institutions, or is there a list of blogs by individual librarians about information and library matters. I am conducting research into children’s mobile libraries and post a lot of information about mobile libraries on the blog I set up specifically to gather details about vehicles that I have visited and links to articles about mobile libraries all over the world. I would like to get my blog to a wider audience.
June 14th, 2010 at 10:45 am
Blogs by institutions and individuals can both be interesting and useful. Our list did not set out to be comprehensive but targetted blogs about using Web 2.0 in the cultural heritage sector. Since there are other lists of blogs, we are now considering whether to continue maintaining our directory. An emerging use for blogs is in research, so interesting to hear what you are doing. UKOLN used a blog in this way for the JISC SIS Landscape Study in 2009 – http://blogs.ukoln.ac.uk/jisc-sis-landscape/.