Walt at Random

My previous post and some accompanying email have resulted in a fair number of messages, mostly direct, a few indirect, for which I’m grateful.

One fairly immediate issue has to do with whether I’ll be at ALA in Washington. This concerns budget, but also a promised speech during the conference (which would, apparently, be my 2010 speech–I seem to be back to one per year). That relates, somewhat indirectly, to a longer-term question having to do with the status of Cites & Insights (and, I suppose, this blog).

Namely…the question of whether my work is meaningful (and appreciated) enough to continue, or whether I should abandon it and spend time entirely on other things, maybe more local. Part of going to ALA or other conferences is keeping in touch; the question is whether that’s worthwhile.

A dear friend asked whether I really thought my work was appreciated. I responded, well, yes, I seem to have pretty good readership and a few people tell me so now and then. (Heck, more than 45,000 pageviews and downloads for one notorious issue so far…not bad for a nonentity in the field.)

Then this dear friend nudged me a little bit: “So, are they buying your books or donating to help keep Cites & Insights going? Does so-called appreciation really mean anything?”

Um.

Well, four people so far have donated to keep C&I going.

As to book sales to individuals…perhaps the less said the better. (I don’t really know who does, or rather doesn’t, buy the books. If you exclude library-held copies as reported in Worldcat.org, that leaves an even dozen sales of But Still They Blog, 50 for The Liblog Landscape, 28 for Academic Library Blogs, 52 for Public Library Blogs, and 214 for Balanced Libraries…and, well, no more than seven for the various paperback annuals of C&I. I think all those numbers are too high–I’d guess other library purchases not [yet] accounted for in Worldcat.org play a significant role.)

So far, I don’t really have a convincing answer for my dear friend. Or one that convinces me that “keeping a hand in” justifies the cost of ALA. The upsurge in donations and sales since that last post amounts to zero, but these are still early days…and, yes, I know, you all have your own financial issues.

The dear friend is suggesting that maybe it’s time for me to wholly retire from the library field. Is the dear friend right?

Followup…: I’ve been informed, just a few minutes ago, of clear evidence that the dear friend is wrong, and I am grateful for that evidence. It looks much more likely that I will be going to ALA Annual, at least this year…and keeping on with C&I while we see what future possibilities arise. Oh, and may I just say “LSW FTW”?

---

On an only slightly related note, my apologies to a few people whose comments, on posts that were mirrored from another blog, have been deleted along with those mirrored posts. It no longer makes sense to have the mirrored posts in this blog; the comments make no sense without the attached posts.

Cites & Insights 10:4 (April 2010) is now available at http://citesandinsights.info/civ10i4.pdf

The 30-page issue is a PDF print-over-the-web publication, as usual, although three of the four essays are also available in HTML form (the article titles are links). As always, My Back Pages is a PDF-only bonus.

This issue includes:

Perspective: On Disconnecting and Reconnecting (pp. 1-9)

Can you turn off all your “connecting” devices for an hour, a day, a week? Should you? A number of librarians and others discuss the virtues of disconnecting from virtual life once in a while–and maybe reconnecting with ourselves, nature and our real-world friends.

Trends & Quick Takes (pp. 9-16)

The good old days that never were, blaming the user for bad survey design, the difference between production tools and creative talent, checklists for writing and publishing–and ten quicker takes on an even wider range of topics.

Making it Work: Thinking about Blogging 5: Closing the Loop

The close of this four-part series (there was no Thinking about Blogging 3), on how we should blog–and notes on some impressive blog research, miscellaneous issues, and a brief threnody on a dead blog.

My Back Pages

Nine little essays on topics as diverse as crackpot physics, how to get diners to spend more, stretching “obsolete” past its limits–and powering a 600-watt device with a 2.5-watt source!

Maybe I need to learn something from mainstream merchants: That is, the value of constant, repetitive advertising. The total number of sales for all Cites & Insights Books in February 2010 was zero. (Fortunately, the total number of donations for C&I itself was slightly higher, although still in the very low single digits….well, one, actually. For which I’m grateful.)

Or maybe I’m pricing ‘em wrong! After all, Neal-Schuman’s bringing out ten very short books on narrow aspects library technology, each 125 6×9 pages (presumably around 30,000 words, maybe slightly more), each $55. With a big prepub push where you can “buy the whole set for a mere $385!” (And LITA’s the copublisher, a situation I’ve always found interesting…) These could be the best library tech books ever, for all I know (hey, friends & acquaintances wrote half of ‘em, so I’m not saying anything negative), but it makes the prices for my books seem sort of tawdry by comparison…

Anyway:

Great Bargains on Essential Books

Some of you may have missed this, but I reduced the prices of most Cites & Insights Books (which may be exactly the wrong thing to do, but):

• Balanced Libraries: Thoughts on Continuity and Change is now $25 paperback, $16 PDF download. (And with a dozen more copies, I’ll reach my “success” criterion: 300 copies sold.)
• The Liblog Landscape 2007-2008: A Lateral Look is also now $25 paperback, $16 PDF download. (Sixty-two copies to date, but who’s counting?)
• I believe every library school should have print copies of Cites & Insights, and that’s easier than ever for the last four volumes–with great full-color photos thrown in for good measure. Volume 6, 2006; Volume 7, 2007; Volume 8, 2008; and Volume 9, 2009 are now just $35 paperback (and when you consider the sheer size of these volumes, “just” is the right word), $25 PDF download (of course, you can download the issues for free–but $20 of that $25 counts as a direct contribution to keep C&I going).

Essential Books

I believe Balanced Libraries is still an essential book–and, if you care about blogging, so are The Liblog Landscape 2007-2008: A Lateral Look and, particularly, my latest: But Still They Blog: The Liblog Landscape 2007-2009. That one goes for a mere $35 paperback, $25 PDF. (So far, it’s a very limited edition, with a baker’s dozen sold.)

Hmm: Maybe that’s the trick: Charge $395 for each book–what you typically pay for Studies, where “you” may not include any W.a.R. readers–or charge $75 and make each one a Limited Edition, taking them offsale after, say, 100 copies are sold.

(Note: The two library blog books weren’t taken offsale for “limited edition” reasons but out of a sense of futility–the sense that people really don’t want to hear anything but unicorns & rainbows regarding how library blogs actually pan out. That’s a topic for another post that I don’t plan to write.)

Supporting Cites & Insights

I had modest sponsorship for Cites & Insights from 2005 through 2009. I don’t now. I’d love to have a sponsor, but I’m admittedly not out beating the bushes of nonexistent contacts to raise one.

Meanwhile, if you find C&I valuable, you can help keep it going by contributing directly. You’ll find the information and the PayPal “Donate” button right there on the C&I home page, just below the contents list for the current issue.

I will note that, if I had $1 for every downloaded/opened copy of Library 2.0 and “Library 2.0,” that would cover sponsorship-equivalent for the next seven years But then, if wishes were horses, we’d be up to our ears in…well, never mind.

I reached a milestone of sorts about half an hour ago–one I might typically discuss in the Bibs & Blather section of Cites & Insights, but I’m thinking that most Bibs & Blather stuff (the “editorial/how we do it good” section) may belong here, rather than in C&I itself.

[Would that truly ungainly sentence/paragraph be any better if I was writing it for C&I? I'd like to think so, but I would be reluctant to make such an assertion.]

The milestone? I’ve emptied the “Trends & Quick Takes” manila folder–which is to say, I’ve dealt with all the stuff from days before I started using delicious to flag future source material for C&I.

Yes, that means another T&QT essay in which most, if not all, of the source material is fairly old–but it does bring things up to at least March 2009. It’s a start. (It’s also about 5,000 words long…)

The danger with delicious, of course, is that it’s easier to tag an article than it is to print out the first page–and I may be tagging way too much stuff as a result. But that’s OK; I’m now doing second passes and filtering out stuff (and reorganizing it) periodically.

The great thing about delicious, in addition to ease, is that I can use it for work and for C&I–the same piece may be appropriate for both venues. That could happen anyway, but it’s more likely this way.

(When I do a scan of my tags, which I do at least once a week, I can also see “looming” situations, where one tag is getting awfully big–noting that I delete delicious items once I’ve dealt with them. Right now, for example, there’s a huge “loom” in amongst the almost-1,000 total items: “gbs”–short for Google Book Search/Google Book Settlement, currently at more than 150 items. I might do a theme issue, I might do an essay…or I might decide that I have little useful to add and untag all 150+ items. We’ll see, most probably after this week’s hearing.)

Cites & Insights 10:3 (March 2010) is now available.

The 26-page issue, PDF as usual (with HTML separates for each essay), includes two essays:

Making it Work: Philosophy and Future (pp. 1-22)

Two clusters–one on the philosophy and values of libraries and the other on high-profile statements on libraries and their future.

Perspective: Writing about Reading 5: Going Down Slow (pp. 22-26)

Slow reading and related topics.

Silly me.

I subscribe to four reasonably active library-related lists (one that I should probably drop), and probably a few others that are so inactive I’ve forgotten I’m subscribed.

Two of those lists–Web4Lib and PUBLIB–are on a little Gmail group to which I send email copies of announcements for new issues of Cites & Insights. (I prepare the announcement in this blog, copy the HTML to the C&I Alert blog and to my “blog” in LISNews, then copy-and-paste the “visible version” to the email. The group currently has three members–these two lists and one individual.)

In recent days, there’s been some kerfuffle on Web4Lib about excessive announcements on that list, primarily those from one punctuation-happy multiblogger who mails to several lists–but I’ve had the sense of some unease about announcements-as-spam in general.

I’m also aware that “deathspotters” wrote off lists as dead years ago–and are now busily writing off email as dead. (OK, so some of them have written off blogs and RSS as dead as well, but at least those two are still recent fatalities. If you don’t have a clear sense of how I feel about the whole “death of…” thing, read the December 2009 EContent or pages 12-16 of the February 2010 Cites & Insights. Better yet, read the whole issue–it’s a good one.)

So, just to be helpful and “lively”…

So I sent a quick note to Web4Lib and PUBLIB saying I’d be helpful–I’d remove Web4Lib from the Gmail announcement group and probably remove PUBLIB as well. After all, there were three other ways people could be informed–and this blog alone has more than 800 subscriptions. (LISNews reaches everybody. Doesn’t it?)

Honestly, I was just trying to be helpful–to eliminate one minor source of “spam” at the possible cost of a few readers.

Not so fast…

I got feedback–some directly on the two lists, some via email. The feedback was consistent: Actually, so far, 100% unanimous: “Don’t.”

That is, don’t stop announcing issues on the lists. Lots of people don’t use RSS but do use lists, and may want to read C&I.

Admittedly, this is a biased sample. Those who are relieved to be rid of that one post a month (more or less) probably wouldn’t bother to say so, and those who aren’t aware of C&I or regard it as worthless trash probably wouldn’t take the time to respond.

I haven’t counted the number of responses. It’s definitely two digits, and that suggests that there may well be three digits worth of readers who benefit from the list announcements.

So I’ll keep them. That decision was made the same day–as I said, the response was quick.

(Will I keep doing C&I indefinitely? Who knows? A new sponsor sure wouldn’t hurt…nor would others joining the triad who’ve already given PayPal contributions for C&I. But that’s a different barrel of monkeys.)

Cites & Insights 10:2 (February 2010) is now available.

The 32-page issue (PDF as usual, with individual articles available in HTML, using the links below) includes:

T&QT Perspective: Trends & Forecasts (pp. 1-16)

A heaping helping of trends, forecasts, ghosts of trends past–and deathspotting. (No, this roundup does not include the Midwinter LITA Top Tech Trends–or any other trendiness actually appearing in 2010. Maybe later.)

Perspective: Music, Silence & Metrics (pp. 16-25)

Are the loudness wars mushing up your music? Maybe so. I report on the problem with excessive dynamic compression, some steps being taken to identify and combat the desire of producers to MAKE IT ALL LOUD, and two sets of real-world metrics. If you ever really listen to music, you should care about this issue.

Offtopic Perspective: Mystery Collection Part 1 (pp. 25-32)

Notes on the first six discs in the 250-movie, 60-disc Mystery Collection, including half a dozen Bulldog Drummond flicks, three Dick Tracy–and eight Sherlock Holmes. Here’s a mystery: Will I keep doing C&I long enough to review this entire set? That would take us into Volume 14…

The ALA 2010 Midwinter Meeting is almost upon us. If weather doesn’t preclude it, I’ll be in Boston a bit less than a week from now (that is, next Friday, but several hours earlier than this post).

Sometimes people forget that, at its heart, the Midwinter Meeting is a meeting–or, rather, about 3,000 of them, all in one spot. It’s explicitly not a conference: There are very few exceptions to the “No Formal Programs” rule.

Some of us who’ve been around ALA too long remember when Midwinter really was little more than a set of meetings, with a relatively small cast (on the order of 2,000-3,000 people). I have early memories of Midwinter in Washington, DC, when it was held in two hotels near the zoo and when you quite literally could spend a few hours in the Sheraton’s lobby bar–at the time, a big, circular, “lobby bar” right in the middle of the lobby–and you’d see almost everybody you knew in the field. (OK, at the time, I didn’t know that many people–but then as now, Midwinter was a great place to meet new ones.)

Even then, topical discussions without planned speakers were a large part of what made Midwinter different. They still are, for all the discussion groups and for those interest groups who don’t just spend Midwinter planning Annual programs. Those discussions were and are a great way to share information and ideas (I won’t say “like an unconference,” but with much of a good unconference’s equality, participation and spontaneity).

If you’re relatively new to Midwinter, don’t be taken aback by the lack of a large formal program. That’s for summer. Midwinter’s a time to get the association’s business done (and, admittedly, a lot more of that really should take place virtually, with due respect to ALA’s sunshine laws), a place to plan for summer, a place for a more focused approach to a slightly smaller set of exhibits–and a place to renew professional acquaintances, make new ones, and share insights and ideas both in groups and in the various lobbies. Let’s hope Boston’s weather is at least tolerable…and that those who need or want to be there are able to make it.

That said, there are a few items I should perhaps repeat prior to Midwinter:

Want to get together? Let me know!

My so-called schedule is still very loose, and will probably stay that way. If you want to get together for some reason, let me know–beforehand, since I won’t have internet access during Midwinter (unless the internet room happens to be less busy than usual!)

But Still They Blog early-bird prices

You can still buy But Still They Blog: The Liblog Landscape 2007-2009 for $20 PDF, $29.50 paper, from now through the end of ALA Midwinter. (If you’re wondering, the difference in my net proceeds for the two versions is enormous: $0.02–I get two cents more for the print version than for the download. So, y’know, buy whichever one suits your needs!)

By the way, I’d still need four people to indicate a possible willingness to buy an ePub version, before I go to the work of producing one. (I have no way of knowing who actually buys Lulu books, by the way.)

Cites ON a Plane 2010

This special non-issue, prepared for your traveling pleasure (or not), will be available from now until I return from ALA Midwinter. Or, better yet, buy the PDF version of But Still They Blog: The Liblog Landscape 2007-2009!

That’s right–here’s another non-issue for your reading pleasure to and from Midwinter, with (almost) no new material:

Cites ON a Plane 2010

Stuff That Originally Appeared in Cites & Insights – 50 pages

Perspectives ON…

• Conferences in a Time of Limits
• Ethics and Transparency
• Semantics, Reality, Learning and Rockstars
• Disagreement and Discussion (with followup)
• The Middle
• Numeracy, Naïveté, Google & Pew
• The Literature

Note: The links in the bullets are to the original essays, all of which appeared in 2007 and 2008. The essays in Cites ON a Plane 2010 (PDF as usual) have had URLs removed and in some cases been trimmed slightly to make them fit.

Caveats and New Material

While 25 sheets (50 pages, printed duplex) is nothing compared to the paper you’ll cope with during Midwinter, this non-issue is primarily intended for ereading. It has bookmarks for the essays and subheadings (but no table of contents), and it does reflow (although how well it reflows…well, that’s up to your PDF reader). It supports Adobe Reader’s text-to-speech capabilities (strange as they are).

But then, 25 sheets isn’t all that much…

This non-issue will disappear on or about January 19, 2010. It might be included in the book version of Volume 10, but it might not (50 pages is a significant chunk of an already-thick volume).

The new material in the issue consists of an introduction and one, count it, one paragraph added as a postscript to the first essay. Here they are, for those of you who wonder but who really aren’t planning to download the whole issue:

Ceci N’est Pas Une Édition

Cue Magritte, not spinning in his grave. This is not an ejournal. More precisely, this is not an issue of Cites & Insights and doesn’t carry an ISSN, proper date, volume and issue number, or masthead.

Other than this introduction, footers citing the source of each essay and one very brief update, this is entirely selected reprints—on the theme of the second word of the issue’s non-title: ON.

No table of contents. No HTML separates (those are all readily available). Just a chunk of plane reading (and I’ll try to make sure the PDF is reflowable, although I don’t have a lot of control over that)—albeit in the new typography.

The non-issue will disappear as soon as I return from the 2010 ALA Midwinter Meeting. It may be included in the trade paperback Cites & Insights 10: 2010.

Why? Well, Cites on a Plane 2007 seemed to get a lot of downloads, so I thought I’d try it again. Total prep time was under three hours, so…

Postscript to the first essay (On Conferences in a Time of Limits):

“I’d be surprised if ALA Midwinter and ALA Annual don’t shrink somewhat, although ALA Annual attendance varies so widely that ‘shrink’ may be hard to measure.” Count me surprised by record attendance at the 2009 ALA Annual Conference in Chicago. I believe we’ll continue to be in a time of limits, and it’s certainly true that some conferences have shrunk or disappeared. Otherwise, it’s too early to comment.

---

When will the next real issue emerge? Shortly after Midwinter. Probably very shortly after Midwinter.

Cites & Insights 10:1 (January 2010) is now available.

The 30-page issue (PDF as usual, with HTML versions of the first three articles also available) includes:

Bibs & Blather (pages 1-6)

Announcing But Still They Blog: The Liblog Landscape 2007-2009, at a special earlybird price; also announcing the trade paperback version of Cites & Insights 9: 2009–and reduced prices on all Cites & Insights Books. Finally, some words about supporting Cites & Insights, which currently lacks sponsorship.

Making it Work Perspective: Thinking about Blogging 4: Declines and Ends (pages 6-22)

Quotes and comments about blogging in decline, how individual blogs change–and the process of pausing or ending a blog.

Interesting & Peculiar Products (pages 22-25)

Five items and four group reviews.

My Back Pages (pages 25-30)

As always, a PDF-only bonus section–this time including notes on Apple apologists, buying friends by the thousands, disappearing technologies, the eternal stereo silly season and Wired’s equally eternal silliness–and the typographic change you’ll see if you read C&I as a PDF.

---

Peering into the future:There will not be a Midwinter issue of Cites & Insights; the next issue will (probably) be February 2010 and will (also probably) appear after Midwinter.

Might there be a non-issue similar to the fabled “Cites On A Plane” (which exists only in the trade paperback version of C&I 7: 2007)? Possibly. Check back around January 6…

Like Chapter 10, Chapter 11 is entirely new to But Still They Blog.

Why does a blogger pause (which I’ll define as not blogging for at least four months) or stop altogether? I’m certain the most common reason is premature blogging, that is, starting a blog before you really know whether you have much to say. I suspect other reasons are all over the map, with the second largest probably running out of steam or losing interest (or, these days, finding that saying what you have to say is easier and faster on Twitter, FaceBook or FriendFeed).

A fair number of libloggers stopped between mid-2007 and mid-2008, or at least paused for so long that they don’t have any posts—at least 13% of those with enough impact to make it into But Still They Blog and probably more than that among the broader liblog population. Some returned; many didn’t.

What follows is a sampling of posts on why people have stopped or paused blogging—or, in some cases, the fateful final posts that don’t appear intended to be final. Included are some “haven’t been blogging much lately” posts.

In Case It’s Not Obvious…

This post is about Chapter 11 of But Still They Blog: The Liblog Landscape 2007-2009, now available at the special introductory price of $29.50 paperback, $20 PDF.

This 319-page trade paperback provides a sweeping look at liblogs (blogs created by library people but, generally, not blogs that are official library publications), with trends, facts, figures, graphs, and profiles for each of 521 liblogs. It continues the most comprehensive detailed look at liblogs (or any category of blogs) that I know of, showing measurable characteristics and how they’re changing over the years.

After the introductory section above, this chapter consists of quotes from blogs and comments on those quotes. Portions, in somewhat different form, may appear in the January 2010 Cites & Insights.

Profiled Blogs

The chapter includes profiles for these liblogs, mentioned in Chapter 11 and not previously profiled.

• See Also…
• explodedlibrary bunker
• Bigenarian Librarian
• The Brewin’ Librarian
• Wireless Libraries
• Virtual librariesinteract.info
• Shelved in the W’s
• Library Marketing-Thinking Outside the Book
• SD Librarian
• digital.brarian
• omg tuna is kewl
• 101 Tips for School Librarians
• Game On: Games in Libraries
• LibraryChange
• Library 2.0: An Academic’s Perspective
• Library Talk
• Library Zen
• Second Life Research Journal
• booktruck.org
• washtublibrarian
• Travels with the State Librarian
• Texadata
• Slow Library
• Christopher Kupec’s Weblog
• The Horseless Library
• Data Obsessed
• InfoPill

Since we’re now about a week (or two) away from the first issue of Cites & Insights Volume 10, and since there have been no hints of sponsorship from any quarter, I’m doing something else–something I did in 2004 for a few months, before YBP began sponsoring C&I.

I’m inviting and accepting donations–with a PayPal Donate button on the C&I home page (and the FAQ page).

When I did this in 2004 (also doing Amazon Tip Jar, which I’m not this time), I had mixed feelings: While C&I was and is (I believe) a substantial service to the library community, we were both working full time at what were probably robust salaries in library terms, if not so much in Silicon Valley terms.

Times have changed. Our “semi-retired” earned income is a lot lower than it was in 2004. (We’re not hurting–being semi-retired is partly by choice–but it’s now true that the loss of sponsorship represents a significant percentage decrease in earned income.)

There are a couple of other differences from 2004:

• Back then, I suggested an appropriate donation range for a year’s worth of C&I, without requiring any given amount. One donation was so low as to appear to be a deliberate insult, akin to leaving your waiter a quarter as a tip. (There are jackasses in every profession…) This time, I’m suggesting a range for single-issue donations or whole-volume donations ($7 to $8 for an issue you find particularly worthwhile, $25 to $50 for a full volume, either less or more happily accepted)–and since I won’t know why a donation is offered, I won’t be offended by a “low issue” donation, although I’d wonder why you’d bother.
• Back then, I suggested that the percentage of readers who found it worthwhile to donate might influence the future existence of C&I. That’s uncomfortably close to a threat, and I’m explicitly not saying anything of the sort this time around. If nobody contributes at all, that won’t automatically cause C&I to go away. If you find C&I worthwhile, read it. If you find it worthwhile enough to contribute, and you can afford to do so without putting yourself in a bind, great. If not, no problem.
• I’d like to think that C&I over the last five years has been better and more broadly useful and relevant to librarians than it was over the first five years. But I would think that, wouldn’t I?

Anyway, there it is. No pressure, no guilt, no threats. If you think Cites & Insights is worth paying a little for, and you’re easily able to do so, fine. If not, also fine. As you’ll see on the C&I home page, there’s also a “not planning to get rich” clause: If donations ever exceed the inflation-adjusted amount I was getting from a sponsor, half of the excess will be donated to appropriate causes.

Oh, and if you plan to contribute $0.25…why not just flame me in the comments instead, and save yourself the quarter?

PS: I’d still love to have a sponsor. If you know of someone who might be appropriate, let them know. If and when there’s a sponsor, the Donate button will disappear.

I asked a question about typography for Cites & Insights on December 4–and got four answers.

Based in part on those answers, I revised the question on December 6–and got some more responses, of which I count two new actual answers.

Which isn’t bad, really–but I’ve also looked at Urchin stats for the past week:

• In addition to RSS reads, those two posts have been viewed directly 264 and 183 times respectively.
• The first test C&I version (Constantia) has been downloaded 53 times and viewed 343 times (I can never quite figure out what pageviews for PDFs really mean, and have consistently ignored them in doing stats for C&I readership)…
• The second test C&I version (Berkeley) has been downloaded 17 times and viewed 159 times.

One reading for this is that 20% of those who viewed the first post directly thought it was worth downloading the test version–and 10% of those who did so have opinions. That’s not an improbable or necessarily unfortunate reading. For the second post, it would suggest that 10% of direct post readers decided to look at the test version–but about 20% of those folks had comments. Also not unlikely.

Chances Are, Most People Don’t Care

Typography isn’t high on most people’s list of concerns, and that’s as it should be, particularly for any well-designed serif face used for print publications: To a lesser or greater extent, the typeface is supposed to disappear behind the content.

So if you read C&I and don’t really care what typeface I use (assuming I won’t go entirely nuts and start using Comic Sans or Copperplate Gothic or Kidz or something…), there’s no reason for you to respond. All three options are extremely readable on the page and at least fairly readable on the screen…and I don’t plan to change the (underdesigned) HTML version at this point. (And if you just love Arial or Helvetica: Nope, there’s no way the print C&I will start using any sans typeface, much less those.)

But In Case You Do…

Here’s one more chance–and, given that most comments appear within the first three days after a post anyway, I’m moving the deadline for responses up to noon on Wednesday, December 16, after which I’ll start working on layout for the next issue.

Here’s the deal–and feel free to ignore it if you really don’t care.

• Take a look at the Constantia version of Volume 9, Issue 13 (if you haven’t already done so).
• But also take a look at the Berkeley version of Volume 9, Issue 13.
• And compare both of these to the published Berkeley Book version.
• Tell me which you like better, either by email to waltcrawford at gmail dot com or as a comment on either this or the other post.

Thanks! I’ll stop bugging y’all about this.

Last year, it seemed reasonable to suppose that, on the whole, liblogs would have fewer posts but longer posts, as Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook and others replaced many of the uses for very short posts.

If anything, that’s even more true in 2009, even as a number of bloggers simply stopped blogging. One new liblog is an extreme case: In the Library with the Lead Pipe, a group blog that’s essentially an essay magazine done in blog form, with each (reviewed and edited) entry the length of a typical magazine or journal article.

While more of the remaining libloggers seem likely to write essays rather than quick posts, there are still blogs for which the single sentence or two is the norm, including link blogs and some others.

In Case It’s Not Obvious…

This post is about Chapter 4 of But Still They Blog: The Liblog Landscape 2007-2009, now available at the special introductory price of $29.50 paperback, $20 PDF.

This 319-page trade paperback provides a sweeping look at liblogs (blogs created by library people but, generally, not blogs that are official library publications), with trends, facts, figures, graphs, and profiles for each of 521 liblogs. It continues the most comprehensive detailed look at liblogs (or any category of blogs) that I know of, showing measurable characteristics and how they’re changing over the years.

The Long and Short of Blogs

Chapter 4 begins with metrics on overall blog length and how they’ve changed. The longest blogs seem to get longer every year: While March-May 2007 tops out at 186,467 words, March-May 2008 jumps past the 200K mark (204,517 words) and March-May 2009 finds one blog all the way up to 238,351…noting that it wasn’t feasible to measure total length of some blogs. At the same time, the median length declined each year–from 6,216 words in 2007 to 5,536 in 2008 and 3,621 in 2009.

More interesting, however, is post length, even if it’s only practical to measure average post length. (It would be interesting to measure length distribution within each blog, but also incredibly time-consuming…) Most of this very long chapter is devoted to discussions and tables relating to average words per post and how post length in blogs has changed over the years–and to the largest set of blog profiles in the book, partly because terse blogs (those averaging less than 100 words per post) are profiled along with the essayists.

Profiles of Longest Blogs, Essayists and Terse Blogs and Longer Posts

These blogs have profiles in Chapter 4 because they fall into one of those four categories and weren’t already profiled in Chapters 1-3.

• always learning
• Museum 2.0
• In the Library with the Lead Pipe
• Info Career Trends
• The Gypsy Librarian
• LibraryTechNZ
• Pop Culture Librarian
• The Krafty Librarian
• Librarian In Black
• The Itinerant Librarian
• Rambling Librarian :: Incidental Thoughts of a Singapore Liblogarian
• Librarilly Blonde
• Nodalities blog
• Swiss Army Librarian
• Emerging Technologies Librarian
• info-fetishist
• Librarians Matter
• Baby Boomer Librarian
• Library Alchemy
• InfoSciPhi
• Academic Librarian
• The Zenformation Professional
• ©ollectanea
• Librarian on the edge
• habitually probing generalist
• rachelvacek.com
• Weibel Lines
• Guardienne of the Tomes
• The Cool Librarian
• Coyle’s InFormation
• Tinfoil + Raccoon
• Au Courant
• meg kribble
• Commentary from Carl Grant
• Information Wants To Be Free
• The Ubiquitous Librarian
• The Other Librarian
• Joeyanne Libraryanne
• Everybody’s Libraries
• Obnoxious Librarian from Hades
• Connecting Librarian
• Silversprite
• Epist
• Open Libraries
• Metalogger
• librarygarden
• shimenawa
• Inherent Vice
• Librarian 2
• Manage This!
• Coffee|Code
• Enquiring Minds Want to Know
• 025.431: The Dewey blog
• QQ*librarian
• MemberBlog
• Musings from Vermont
• Connie Crosby
• The Singing Librarian Talks (or Writes…)
• Gather No Dust
• library webhead
• Your Neighborhood Librarian
• The Medium is the Message
• EBM and Clinical Support Librarians@UCHC
• eFoundations
• Llyfrgellydd
• Library Angst
• David’s Random Stuff
• userslib.com
• Angels have the phone box
• BentleyBlog
• schenizzle
• Stephen Gallant Review
• The Vital Library
• Feral Library Tales
• digitizationblog
• Practical Katie
• It’s not easy being a George
• Library Computer Guy’s Weblog
• drupalib
• HappyGeek’s CodeX
• AbsTracked
• Libraries in the NHS
• The Invisible Web Weblog
• Darth Libris
• SPLAT
• New Jersey Academic Librarian
• Social Justice Librarian
• Information Research – ideas and debate
• infodoodads
• Nowhere North
• Libraries Build Communities
• Youth Services Corner
• Buffalo Wings and Toasted Ravioli
• LITA Blog
• Simon Chamberlain’s library weblog
• Card Catalog of Creativity
• The Life of Books
• Chez Shoes
• ALA Marginalia
• The Liminal Librarian
• Librarian by Day
• ∆igital Serendipities
• the New Cybrary
• in forming thoughts
• geeky artist librarian

I’ve received four varied responses to my request for opinions on a typeface change for Cites & Insights.

Based on those responses and thinking about it a little more, I believe there’s a reasonable third alternative, thus this post.

So you don’t have to jump between two posts, I’ll repeat the cogent text from the previous post–but pay attention to the new “What Do You Think?” section:

For the last five years, Cites & Insights has used Berkeley Oldstyle Book as a text face (with Berkeley Bold for boldface, since Berkeley Book doesn’t have a bold version and “bolded” typefaces are inherently ugly). It’s one of the most readable serifs in the business; my alma mater knew what they were doing when they commissioned the typeface from Goudy nearly a century ago.

But it’s also very much a book typeface, a little light on the printed page.

I’ve become quite fond of Constantia, one of the typefaces introduced by Microsoft along with either Windows Vista or Office 2007. I love the traditional non-lining nature of its numbers (to me, they’re much easier to read than modern lining numerals). I like the overall flow of the typeface.

But it’s heavier than Berkeley Book–and sets just a little wider as well.

What Do You Think (revised)?

The third option changes the body typeface from Berkeley Oldstyle Book to Berkeley Oldstyle–the bold version of which is currently used for bolded text.

The basic difference is that Berkeley Oldstyle (or Berkeley) is a little heavier than Berkeley Oldstyle Book. Otherwise, the letterforms are nearly identical.

I can see that one reason people might prefer the Constantia option is that it’s easier to read if you’re reading the PDF on-screen: Berkeley Book is a little light for comfortable on-screen reading (which is inherently lower-resolution than print). Regular Berkeley is heavier than Berkeley Book and lighter than Constantia. (Testing a duplex print sample on 20lb. paper, I find that showthrough isn’t bad with Berkeley, while it’s pretty apparent with Constantia.) Of course, Berkeley has lining numerals, just like Berkeley Book.

So here’s the new deal:

• Take a look at the Constantia version of Volume 9, Issue 13 (if you haven’t already done so).
• But also take a look at the Berkeley version of Volume 9, Issue 13.
• And compare both of these to the published Berkeley Book version.
• Tell me which you like better, either by email to waltcrawford at gmail dot com or as a comment on either this or the other post.

They’re all PDFs. The HTML versions won’t be changing, and don’t use any of these typefaces.

(The Berkeley version’s also longer than the Berkeley Book version; I think nearly all of that difference is because I haven’t redone copyfitting.)

Once again, the deadline is Friday, December 18Wednesday, December 16, at which point I’ll start assembling and copyfitting the first 2010 issue…

And thanks to those who’ve already answered. In case it’s not obvious, this is a real request: I have in no way made up my mind on what to do!