Category: Blogging

Current strangest blog search terms

I do get hits on here from some very odd search terms (which has actually prodded me about another point, to be blogged on later), but I have to say, todays is probably a winner, just for the disturbing thoughts about the searcher that it brings to mind:

“ruminants and librarians”

Is there someone out there looking for librarians that chew the cud? Or do they think that somewhere, there’s a librarian in charge of a library of ruminants, all peacefully grazing in fields according to their classification?

Enquiring minds want to know….

Updating the UK Library Bloggers wiki

In response to my original post about needing help to double check entries and add last visit dates for the UK Library BLoggers wiki, the lovely Jo and Christine have kindly volunteered to help out, yay!!!

So, over the next wee while, we’ll be revisiting all the blogs already on there, and checking the original quick synopsis is accurate, and adding in a date of last visit.

In my meanderings last night I found that already, in the month since I’d first visited, one blog had shut down and moved to another address with a new focus, and a new university departmental blog had started…it’s all go with us library bloggers!

So thanks again to Christine and Jo for giving their spare time to help with this task!

So, now the UK library bloggers wiki exists…

…and I’m getting daily addition request emails (which is lovely!), I realise that there’s a flaw in the data I originally collected.

There’s no “visit date”, and for something as rapidly changing as blogs, that’s not good – things may change quickly, and without a visit date, it’ll be hard to know when things happened.

So….anybody want to volunteer to take a trip around the blogs, check what I’ve written about them for accuracy, and email me with the date of visit / revised synopsis?

No, thought not…guess what I’ll be doing this weekend?

Also, the line between “librarian” blogs, and “information professional” blogs is getting harder to draw. The list was set up to pull together all the UK library / librarian bloggers I could find. If people didn’t say in their “About” section that they were a librarian, or worked in a library, or the blog was run by a library, they were excluded. So yes, this has ruled out great people like Brian Kelly, and useful blogs on information literacy like Moira’s Info Lit Blog, but really, if the list is to stay accurate in only covering UK library bloggers, it’s got to be restricted to only those who define themselves as a librarian, or blogs for a library service…

Liveblogging from conferences

There have been quite a few peeps whose blogs I read who’ve been attending various conferences over the past few months. Quite a few of them seem to ‘liveblog’ the events they go to, which seems like a good idea in concept – you get the ideas and discussions from the event, as they happen, without having to go, very useful if you’re not funded to attend events, or time / location prevent you from being there.

But for me, the reality of reading these posts, just seems like looking at the PowerPoint slides of a seminar you’ve not been to – there’s probably some good points in there, but without attending the associated presentation, it can be hard to make sense of.

Very often there’s just random statements or key phrases bullet pointed, like:

“user interaction”

“funding”

“databases”

Probably good topics, but lists like these are impossible to extrapolate a thread of discussion from. Posts like these that bounce through a presentation and try and condense it into snappy points are only of use to those who actually attended…did you ever have to copy lecture notes for a class you missed, and had to make the choice of who to ask? You always went for the person who made the in-depth, full content notes of what was presented, not the ones who jotted down the main points. Main points are good as the basis to start from, but don’t give you enough information to fully understand what was going on, you still have to go back and double check things, find out more etc.

Trying to turn a 45 min / 1 hour chat into a coherent blog post just doesn’t seem to be possible while actually listening to the presentation. Most of us are not trained journalists or transcribers – we can’t write things that make sense while also listening to what’s going on. Why could blogging about what you’ve learned not just wait until it can be written into a readable format? Sure, you might be using your blog to keep notes of these points to do just that later on, but in that case, why not just keep them as a draft version, why bother to publish gobbledygook? Seriously, if you publish a ‘notes’ version, and then a ‘proper’ version, the ‘notes’ version has already irritated me enough that I’ll not waste time coming back and looking for the full version.

Or if you’re using it just for your own reference? Use a Word doc, don’t publish it to your blog!

Is there now a pressure on conference attendees to be the first to blog each event? Is it more important to get the information out there fast, regardless of how readable it is?