Steve Ely

Surveying the academic library blogs

I mentioned on Friday that I’ve been putting some effort toward the the blog of the Cornette Library of West Texas A&M University, where I work as a reference librarian, and have been hoping to get an idea of 1. how much use and impact other academic libraries are getting out of blogs and 2. whether there are any good ideas I can steal from them about how best to use and promote ours.

Certainly, there is some literature about this, and I’m going to study that and note it here, but there are several reasons for me to seek out and scrutinize all the applicable academic library blogs I can myself.   The key thing, though, is that I won’t have nearly as clear an idea of how these blogs are being used and promoted without examining them myself.  For that reason, I’m looking for blogs at the main web pages for the libraries at all four-year colleges and universities, state by state, either until I get through all of the U.S. states or just enough that I’m satisfied.  We’ll see how it goes.

Since I’m in Texas now, I started with the schools in Texas, and then I moved on to Pennsylvania since I’m from there originally.   I’ll probably go through at least ten states or so.  State selection may be kind of arbitrary, but coverage of schools should be pretty comprehensive.  No community colleges or outright trade schools and generally not medical or law schools or the like, but pretty much anything that grants bachelor degrees.

So far I’ve been taking notes in a Google document, and it’s occurred to me that I’ve only really been noting those libraries that do have blogs, which makes sense because those are the only ones where there’s really anything to observe in answer to the questions here.  But in saying nothing of those libraries that have no blogs, it becomes unclear what proportion of schools don’t.  I should go back and fill a spreadsheet indicating some simple yes/no information on whether they’ve got anything.  The “yes” libraries are already clear from the notes I’ve taken about them, but it’d be good to be clear about who all the “no” schools are.

Obviously, I think that good blogging is an asset, but the simple fact that some library doesn’t have a blog shouldn’t be taken as a criticism by me.   There are obviously more important priorities, with library service generally and with library web sites.   From what I’ve seen of various schools in Texas and Pennsylvania so far, it seems that even most academic libraries that have blogs aren’t doing all that much with them.    I expect that as I go along, I’ll find more impressive examples.  For the time being, here are my notes as they stand now.

After I pull together the spreadsheet mentioned above, I’ll post a link to that here.  And after I get through all of Pennsylvania or maybe a few more states, I’ll put up a new post with some analysis.