Silence in the Stacks
June 9th, 2005Scott McLemee wanted to know if there were any “ruminative” academic librarian bloggers out there, so he turned to Steven Bell:
““I can’t say any individual has developed a blog that has emerged as the ‘voice of academic librarianship,’ ” noted Bell in response to my query. “Why? If I had to advance a theory I’d say that as academic librarians we are still geared towards traditional, journal publishing as the way to express ourselves. I know that if I have something on my mind that I’d like to write about to share my thoughts and opinions, I’m more likely to write something for formal publication (e.g., see this piece.) Perhaps that is why we don’t have a ‘juicy’ academic librarian out there who is taking on the issues of the day with vocal opinions.”
“And he added something that makes a lot of sense: “To have a really great blog you have to be able to consistently speak to the issues of the day and have great (or even good) insights into them — and it just doesn’t seem like any academic librarian out there is capable of doing that. I think there are some folks in our profession who might be capable of doing it. But if so they haven’t figured out yet that they ought to be blogging, or maybe they just don’t have the time or interest.”
Anyone want to comment on this? I’m not in the mood right now. (link via del.icio.us)