state of the library blogosphere, 2006
Michael Stephens emailed me a few days ago asking about the number of public library blogs on the wiki. I did a quick copy & paste into Excel, some fast arithmetic, and sent some rough totals his way. We were both blown away by the numbers (I think the word “hot” might have been mentioned, don’t quote me) and Michael reminded me that it’s probably time for another “state of the library blogosphere” post since the last one was done in April 2005.
Since Michael set the bar high with his fancy graphics, I tried to follow suit. Here’s a look at the number of library blogs in 2005 & 2006 (note: “internal” shows up as zero in 2005 because I wasn’t tracking internal blogs when I ran these numbers last year):
You will notice that the numbers are slightly lower than the ones Michael reported. That’s because this graph reflects the number of institutions that are blogging, as opposed to the number of library blogs in existence. Since a number of libraries have multiple blogs (news blogs, teen blogs, etc.), I thought a more accurate representation of the spread of blogs in libraryland would be to look at how many institutions are publishing blogs (rather than how many library blogs are being published). Make sense?
In preparation for this post, I undertook a long overdue cleanup of the wiki (sort of related aside: still no wiki spam! None! UGH. A day after I posted this, the vandals hit! I’m monitoring the situation for now but might have to move to login-to-edit. Stay tuned), cleaning up duplicates, moving blogs to appropriate categories, checking URLs, and generally getting the house in order. In the process of checking URLs, I came across a number of blogs that have not been updated in a few months (I defined “a few months” as 6 months or more) and I decided that rather than delete those blogs, I’d keep them on the list and append a “last updated” notice to the link. My rationale here was that even though a blog is no longer updated, there might still be value in retaining it since it could provide good ideas for anyone exploring the list for possible uses of blogs in their institution.
However, as I ran the numbers for the graph above, I knew it would be misleading if I didn’t indicate just how many of those institutions had abondoned their blogs (some were clearly abandoned for a reason and the last post usually spells out that reason; others look like they simply lost steam). Here’s a look at the same numbers again (2006), with “inactive” blogs indicated:
Not extraordinary numbers, by any means, but numbers worth noting for the inevitable questions they beg: why have 16% of public libraries abandoned their blogs? Why do school libraries fair better when it comes to, what shall we call it… blog longevity? I’m sure anyone who has ever done a presentation or written an article on blogs and libraries touts the format for being easy to maintain, so why, then, have 12% of academic libraries let their blogs go stale? Of course, we already know some of the answers to these questions (lack of staff/time/buy-in, etc.), but what this exercise has crystallized for me is the simple fact that, while blogs provide a good solution for some libraries, they aren’t the perfect solution for every institution.
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