I think, actually, that the original author waffled on whether he wanted blogging by academic librarians or blogging on academic librarianship. I stand by my sense that there’s plenty of both, if you look… but for whatever reason, neither group typically cares to make academic librarianship the sole focus of their blogs, and Original Author wasn’t willing to count blogs with other interests as potentially relevant.

His loss.

I also wonder about relevant topic-focused blogs (digitization librarian, Catalogablog, the FRBR Blog, etc). Such blogs should be the foundation of almost any academic librarian’s blogroll, IMO — but are they blogs about academic librarianship? I dunno.

I knew about the article (and the extent to which Steven Bell got hammered for his quoted remarks). What I’m implying–no, saying–above is that Meredith’s comment isn’t supported by the survey.

Yes, there are a fair number of academic librarians who blog. I don’t think there was ever much question about that.

But relatively few academic librarians focus their blogs on issues of academic librarianship. Your own posts offer some of the reasons why, as do the comments on the IHE article. (And, as noted in those comments, science librarianship is somewhat of an exception.)

As you note, CavLec would never be mistaken for a voice of academic librarianship–but, with your new job, you’re actively discussing aspects of one ongoing issue (workable digital repositories), albeit generally at a level of “making it work” detail.

I’m not sure there’s an “answer” here–I think it’s probably appropriate for most academic librarians to use traditional channels when discussing the major issues of academic librarianship–but I also don’t think that saying “See? X number of academic librarians have blogs” is at all a response to the assertion that very few blogs run by academic librarians discuss issues of academic librarianship.

In a way, my parenthetical note may be apropos: Walt at Random is run by an analyst at RLG, but it’s not at all about design and implementation issues for an organization like RLG. If there were a dozen other “utility”-based blogs like W.a.R., and if someone complained that nobody was blogging about “utility”-related issues, pointing to those bloggers would not be a response. That’s not at all the case, to be sure: all of the OCLC-based blogs and hangingtogether.org are, at least partially, about the issues facing organizations like RLG and OCLC.

When I pointed out on-blog that yes, we were talking about this stuff, just not as our entire focus in blog-life, he got snippy with me in email. (I didn’t republish the exchange, though I was sorely tempted, because I thought he meant well by the article and didn’t care to embarrass him.)

So, yes. Apparently one or two people think academic librarianship has no voice.