Collection Developments @ Sno-Isle

Meredith Farkas (Information Wants To Be Free) has an article in Library Journal 12/15/07 summarizing her findings of which librarians are blogging and why. Some of the things I found interesting.

Who blogs.

• Academic librarians are more likely to blog than public or special librarians.
• More men than women blog.
• The number of librarians who are blogging continues to grow.

Most bloggers contribute to more than one blog.
“A collaborative blog can be an excellent option for those who don’t want the sole responsibility for a blog but want to share their ideas. Some 24% of respondents contribute to a collaborative blog they consider professional in nature, and 12% contribute to a collaborative personal blog.”

A collaborative blog like ours.

Why they blog.

“Respondents were asked to list their top three reasons for blogging. The majority (69%) identified sharing ideas with others. Other popular reasons include building community (38%), contributing to the profession (23.2%), and reaching out to patrons (23%).”

Meredith also notes that many librarians blog as a form of writing practice and as a way to keep abreast of developments in librarianship. A related article on Libraries and Blogging appeared in the 11/15/07 LJ.

You can read Meredith’s full findings here.

In order to make this into what I hope will be a useful resource for us, I’ve added some links and RSS feeds. There are now RSS feeds for the Collection Development feature in Library Journal, as well as the Books section of the New York Times.

Collection Development also has a Delicious feed on the blog as well. I’m hoping that all of us will add content to delicious as a way to share articles and websites amongst ourselves. See me for logon information. If you have a delicious feed of your own, please add Colldevsnoisle to your network. Don’t know what Delicious is, watch this video here.

In the Links and Tools section you’ll find links to particularly useful resources. I’ve added links to the New York Times Bestseller Lists, and also to a site called Metacritic which pulls together reviews from respected critics and major publications. Metacritic gather reviews books, film, DVD, games, and music. The reviews are weighted depending on the authority of the source and then the combined scores of all the reviews are averaged to determine an overall score. So for example if you look up a film like “The Usual Suspects” a review by Roger Ebert will have more importance than a review from Jim’s Movie Blog–and no, I don’t have a movie blog. The combined scores in Metacritic are nice but what’s really useful is that for many of the sources the full text of the review is just a click away.

Our recent Collection Summit got me thinking about alternative avenues of communication for not only ourselves but our customers in the branches. So I have created a IM identities (jpmccluskey200 in AIM and Yahoo, and probably very soon Google Talk. I have added my ID as part of my signature in Outlook. I use Meebo to manage the various accounts, which is very simple and since its web based it accessible anywhere which is improvement over Trillian the system I used to use. Trillian requires installing software which limits accessibility when you don’t have it on a PC, say like in the training room. And since it was being kind of quirky with my Yahoo account it seems like a good time to move on to Meebo.

My thoughts about using IM are that it will allow us to check quickly to see if any of have time to talk about an issue, so we don’t have to get up to see that someone’s in a closed door meeting. And also its just another way to get a quick answer to a question. Libraries have been using Meebo for awhile now and Librarian in Black has a good post that gives some useful background information. All this is to say, Hey try something new and IM me. Jim