Weblogs: Do they belong in libraries?
July 25th, 2004An article entitled, “Weblogs: Do they belong in libraries?” tried to answer the question that has been asked of me many times throughout the past few years. While the author skirmishes around the question a bit and discusses some of the library weblogs that she has found, she does come to a valid and positive conclusion about weblogs in libraries:
“I think the late Douglas Adams would have approved of weblogs. The snowflake/blizzard analogy may refer to something completely different, but it does seem to encapsulate their very essence, i.e. something which starts life small, but which gradually ’snowballs’ into something bigger as more people contribute comments, ideas, news, etc. Above all weblogs can, and should be, fun - which is perhaps why they appeal to children and are being used by children’s librarians.”
A comment. If I read one more article that includes sentences similar to “A search on Google (using the search terms ‘library weblog’) returned 544,000 hits on 21 June 2004…”, I’ll scream very loud (and since I do most of my online reading after Hallie goes to bed, her waking up is not a good thing, not to mention my wife’s reaction). Even though the author immediately writes, “…this is not indicative of widespread use of weblogs by libraries for user-related activities”, I still felt the need to flinch. Librarians shouldn’t be writing stuff like this, plain and simple. It only exaggerates the notion that Google is the “be all to end all” of the web search world. She was looking for library weblogs and could have used much better tools for her query. Why no mention of Syndic8 , NewsIsFree, or even Feedster? We have to get past the “Google this, Google that” scenarios that plague not only the general public, but librarians as well. This is not to say that librarians shouldn’t use Google. It is a good engine for some types of searches, but definitely not for finding library weblogs. Oh, a quick check at The ODP would have revealed better results as well.