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Thursday, April 14, 2005
In the blogwithoutalibrary there are some interesting figures on how many libraries are blogging. The answer seems to be 245, with 107 being academic, 86 public libraries, 12 school libraries and so on. This is of course an incomplete list - there must be more, surely? If you are a library, and you do blog, check out the link, and if you're not included, get yourself on the list!
Phil 9:29 AM
Comments:
Hi Phil,
In my report on the Online Information conference (Jan/Feb issue of Library and Information Update) I included some brief info about blogs in libraries. Anne Clyde ( www.hi.is/~anne/ ) had mentioned finding 198 library weblogs.
Here's her blogs page: http://www.hi.is/~anne/weblogs.html
This seem to me an astonishingly low figure - especially when another speaker mentioned that the staff in Google alone write several hundred blogs themselves.
Even when librarians do produce blogs - only a minority actually enable two-way dialogue, apparently!
In general the opportunities offered by online communities in general don't seem to have been fully understood and grasped yet. (LIS-CILIP, for instance, is on Jiscmail - arguably rather clunky and limited compared to Yahoo e-groups?).
Here's a snippet from my conference review:
One hot area in libraries is weblogs, or online journals. But Anne Clyde (www.hi.is/~anne/) highlighted how libraries have some catching up to do. She found 198 libraries with their own weblogs, at a time when there are about 6m weblogs in total (staff in Google alone write several hundred blogs).
Also worrying is that half the library weblogs had no link to the library’s own website, under a third had the street address of the library and only a fifth had links to the library catalogue.
Only 10 per cent included the library’s opening hours or information about other services provided.
Anne was also concerned that most blogs were one-way, with only 44 per cent enabling interaction, such as commenting on posts. Only a fifth of library blogs were updated daily – necessary to foster continuing user interest. For Anne the most exciting blogs are those produced by teams rather than individuals – such as Roselle Public Library’s Blogger Book Club.
Business blogging proponent Adriana Cronin-Lukas of Big Blog Company suggested that blogs’ spiralling popularity is due to the way they allow individual creativity to flourish: ‘Nothing was ever invented at a meeting.’
HP’s Miranda Mowbray looked from blogs out to online communities in general, showing the important organisational role that such social ties can bring – and the mistake managers often make in trying to create such communities in a top-down, hierarchical way.
Matthew
PS Gave your blog a plug re Gorman's comments in April Update - see page 7.
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In my report on the Online Information conference (Jan/Feb issue of Library and Information Update) I included some brief info about blogs in libraries. Anne Clyde ( www.hi.is/~anne/ ) had mentioned finding 198 library weblogs.
Here's her blogs page: http://www.hi.is/~anne/weblogs.html
This seem to me an astonishingly low figure - especially when another speaker mentioned that the staff in Google alone write several hundred blogs themselves.
Even when librarians do produce blogs - only a minority actually enable two-way dialogue, apparently!
In general the opportunities offered by online communities in general don't seem to have been fully understood and grasped yet. (LIS-CILIP, for instance, is on Jiscmail - arguably rather clunky and limited compared to Yahoo e-groups?).
Here's a snippet from my conference review:
One hot area in libraries is weblogs, or online journals. But Anne Clyde (www.hi.is/~anne/) highlighted how libraries have some catching up to do. She found 198 libraries with their own weblogs, at a time when there are about 6m weblogs in total (staff in Google alone write several hundred blogs).
Also worrying is that half the library weblogs had no link to the library’s own website, under a third had the street address of the library and only a fifth had links to the library catalogue.
Only 10 per cent included the library’s opening hours or information about other services provided.
Anne was also concerned that most blogs were one-way, with only 44 per cent enabling interaction, such as commenting on posts. Only a fifth of library blogs were updated daily – necessary to foster continuing user interest. For Anne the most exciting blogs are those produced by teams rather than individuals – such as Roselle Public Library’s Blogger Book Club.
Business blogging proponent Adriana Cronin-Lukas of Big Blog Company suggested that blogs’ spiralling popularity is due to the way they allow individual creativity to flourish: ‘Nothing was ever invented at a meeting.’
HP’s Miranda Mowbray looked from blogs out to online communities in general, showing the important organisational role that such social ties can bring – and the mistake managers often make in trying to create such communities in a top-down, hierarchical way.
Matthew
PS Gave your blog a plug re Gorman's comments in April Update - see page 7.