Once again, it’s a good thing: Few posts because energy spent on other things. To wit:
The first draft of The Project–that is, “Open Access: What You Need to Know,” an ALA Editions Special Report that will appear in 2011–is complete, and starting today/tomorrow I’ll do the Big Changes: Integrating a fair amount of new material (some of it from “a dozen or so” delicious entries that turn out to be, oog, 88 of them), refining organization, clarifying, aiming toward a second draft that’s probably publishable. That won’t be what I submit to the publisher, but the third (and final) draft should be mostly refinement. (Given that blog posts are “not quite first drafts” and most C&I essays are roughly 1.5th drafts, doing three drafts is unusual for me.)
The Other Project–current working title “The Way We Blog: English-Language Liblogs 2007-2010”–gets a little attention when I’m not working on the book, and got a lot during a few days while letting the first draft sit (complete) before revisiting it. Now up to 1,250 liblogs and another 1,262 excluded candidates. A few (anywhere from 5 to 20) more hours of data gathering to do, before setting it aside until it’s time to start the analysis and writing, probably after C&I resumes and the book is complete.
A couple of changes at home (OK, finally getting an HDTV after discussing it for 2-3 years) have taken up quite a bit of time, and that’s not quite done.
I’m learning a lot along the way in The Other Project, as I expanded it from “liblogs that show up in one of the typical places” to “liblogs the existence of which I can discover.” For example:
- There’s a large and extremely vigorous group of liblogs almost none of which show up in the typical places (they have their own typical places), namely kidlit and tween/teen/YA lit blogs (I’m only including ones clearly by library people–not all the others). I mean extremely vigorous. I wonder when some of these people sleep…
- I’d already apologized for an intemperate post a couple of years ago about what program is used by most libloggers. Turns out, I suspect, that the only answer is the usual one: “It depends.” For example, Blogger seems pretty clearly to be the platform of choice for many or most of these book review blogs, even while WordPress is pretty clearly the platform of choice for experienced tech, etc., liblogs. But that’s preliminary.
- A few blog templates (or individual choices) seem to go out of their way to discourage reading more than either the most recent post or the most recent handful of posts–e.g., blogs with neither archives nor “older post” controls, or blogs that show “older posts” one. post. at. a. time, with no monthly or weekly archive functions. Such is life.
- Relatively few bloggers are adopting light-text-on-dark templates (although I was astonished to see a highly-touted new WordPress template that’s exactly that)…but there are some, and one or two that use the even worse black-text-on-dark or purple-text-on-black template, or something other that actively resists reading. I usually take the hint.
So there’s an update, such as it is. Now, off to make sense of those 88 items tagged “OA” in delicious. I would have sworn it was only a dozen or so…
Oh, by the way: Lulu’s summer free delivery sale ends either today or tomorrow.
