Friday, August 24, 2007

#9 - Sniffin' around

George and I reckon that the all-time ultimate list of library and librarian blogs would have to be John Hubbard's LISWiki site - it lists hundreds! And a quick sniff suggests we would rather have a good romp at the park than read many of them - thinking out loud might not have worldwide appeal. Anyway, LISWiki highlights the ones that have a Google PageRank of 7 or more but I don't get it - the ones where I find the reflections and comments useful aren't highlighted.

My favourites - in no particular order - are:
blyberg.net
David Lee King
Stephens' Lighthouse
Information Wants to be Free
and The Other Librarian - the guy who writes this has a really good post called We Asked for 2.0 Libraries and We Got 2.0 Librarians. This is well worth a read - important that we have some exposure to the "stuff" out there, so we can assess what's worth having.

And try The Annoyed Librarian on a bad 2.0 day, when you already have a huge load of stuff to do. (I can only get this done at home and each thing takes me at least an hour to really explore; someone else said they can do it in quiet moments on desk - not a bad idea!)

And if I had more time, what I'd like to do as an exercise is look at 20 libraries which have posted blogs on their websites and see just how much their communities are engaging with them. Presumably the "being where the users are" concept can be tested - if they are talking to us (ie commenting on, or engaging online in some way with a library blog), then the exercise is worth it. If they aren't, shouldn't we be asking questions?

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