I don’t understand. The announcement of each issue includes the contents–a link for each essay and a brief description of that essay. “A headline and a summary” is how I’d put it, and that’s been true for years now. It sure shows up in my RSS feed for issue announcements…

I also don’t understand “C&I has been a blog from the beginning”–it’s designed as an ejournal, it appears periodically, it’s not a set of independent pieces provided in reverse chronological form. I suppose you could call D-Lib a blog, too, but that doesn’t make it one.

If you’re saying that each essay should have its own posted announcement, well, that’s one possibility. Is that “moving forward”? I’m not sure. If what you’re saying is that C&I is really just a bunch of blog posts like any other bunch of blog posts…I’m not sure what to do with that either. If that’s the case, then the issues go away, which means that C&I also goes away: I already have a blog.

Maybe that’s moving forward. I dunno.

Guy hit the nail on the head. It is not long form versus short form but the inability to see what is in each issue before accessing it. Your RSS feed shows only that there is a new issue where it needs to show a headline and a summary.

C&I has been a blog from the beginning but in PDF form but it is not about that but the lack of structure that gets in the way. Over the last few years most of us have moved into getting comfortable with scanning a lot of RSS feeds and C&I asks us to step out of what has become a comfortable workflow.

C&I was the first place to go for so long, it deserves to move forward.

Bob

Interesting. I hadn’t thought of “web-native” quite that way–and, to my mind, turning C&I into a series of blog posts would be the end of C&I (and perhaps, or perhaps not, the enrichment of Walt at Random).

It is already the case that you can “click on content that for some reason interests you” from the announcement posts, as each article summary (other than My Back Pages) has a live link as its title.

I could–and perhaps should–expand that by doing separate, smaller (or longer) posts for each article, possibly going back to some earlier issues. I’ll have to think about that.

Actually posting the full text of each article? Again, that would turn C&I into a very odd blog, and would mean the end of the experiment (and, probably, of any chance for sponsorship). Frankly, without the issue structure, I don’t think I’d put even half as much effort into the essays…

I don’t know if I can say anything to help you decide your next course of action, but I will give it a try.

I follow your Atom feed, which is how I came to read the blog post, but don’t routinely open C&I unless something in it happens to attract me. The fact that this doesn’t always happen says more about me than about the publication. What I do now is pretty specialised; I upload higher degree theses to the university repository, maintain a wiki and do some general cataloguing. I’m not blogging any more (although I follow lots of blogs).

Maybe the reason behind this is more NNW than anything else. If C&I were a blog it would be possible to scan the contents and c;lick on content that for some reason interested me. Because the content isn’t accessible that way I probably don’t open an issue very often. It’s competing with other information sources that give more of a clue about their contents from my feed reader. I enjoy C&I when I do open an issue (although I might skim a piece that isn’t really on a topic that grabs me); you write as well and engagingly as ever and I like the personal nature of your observations.

I hope this gives you some clue as what might be behind the phenomena you are trying to get a grip on. I do wish you well in whatever you decide and applaud your desire to keep your communication with your audience (which I assure you is still out there) real and vital,

Regards

Guy Aron

What generally motivates me to read certain portions of C&I over others is whether the topic is of interest to me or my workplace (so I never really read much on OA as it is not a topic that drives me or my workplace, for example).

However, I tend not to read essays where I feel the topics has already been “done to death”. For me, HarperCollins was a topic that had been done to death already. Also, I still feel that the uproar is much ado about nothing given that there are major publishers that don’t offer e-materials to libraries at all.

“Timely” issues may always be susceptible to being done to death given how many venues there are for commentary about the latest “thing”. I look to journals (which is what I consider C&I to be) to be less timely and more in depth.

For what it’s worth.