why “blog without a library”?

It’s a pretty short story, actually. But I get asked about it often enough that I thought it would be handy to have something to link to.

Back in 2003, I wrote a chapter for a book about the future of libraries. My chapter was called “The Library Blog: Serving Users and Staying Relevant” and it focused on, you guessed it, the ways libraries could use blogs to reach out to their online users. The chapter had a whole slew of links in it, and I was realistic: I knew that by the time the book hit the streets, some of those links would be dead (I was right; the book was finally published in early 2005 and about 30% of my links no longer worked), so I thought it would be a good idea to set up a companion web page that interested readers could visit for updated information and links. It just made sense for that web page to be a blog, and “Blog without a library” came to me late one evening. It made sense at the time – this started out as a companion to a book chapter about library blogs, but it’s a blog without a library. Of course, the name hardly makes sense any more since I now blog about a whole bunch of other topics (and hardly ever about library blogs anymore), but there you go. bwal.net is already over 3 years old, so I think we’re well past the reasonable deadline for a name change.

Besides, I still sort of like it. Sort of.