At one point, a few of you (well, one) expressed interest in a book version of Library 2.0 and “Library 2.0”, presumably including the followup Finding a Balance: Libraries and Librarian. I started on that project but didn’t finish it: Adding the perfect, fully-vetted, Chicago-style citations and bibliography for all of the blog quotes and reindexing the essays just seemed like more work than it was worth.
But you can get both those essays in book form now, indexed and everything–together with another 330+ pages of great content, including Looking at Liblogs: The Great Middle, my study of 213 liblogs. And for the same price as I would have charged for the Library 2.0 material alone: $29.50, the (so far) standard price for Cites & Insights Books. Just go to Lulu and pick it up. (It’s only available from Lulu: CreateSpace doesn’t do 8.5×11″ books.)
Volume 6 had more “regular” pages than Volume 7, but the bound volume’s slightly shorter (388 pages instead of 405 pages), thanks to the extra phantom issue in 2007.
Extra: There’s something extra for buyers of the bound volume, in addition to a great wraparound cover picture (the Golden Gate Bridge from the deck of the Crystal Harmony, passing through on our way to Alaska in, I think, 2001…or 2003…or 2005). A four-page preface offers a few notes about Volume 6, but mostly offers an update on the liblogs covered in the 2005 and 2006 studies–which ones have moved and which appear to be gone.
The short version: of the 60 blogs in 2005, 10% may have shut down and 17% have changed URLs and/or names. Of the 213 blogs in 2006 (there’s a little overlap), 21% may have shut down and another 12% changed URLs and/or names, sometimes more than once (hi, Mermaid!) The preface details all of the changes I know about as of December 22, 2007–and clarifies what “may have shut down” means, giving the last post date when it’s even possible to get to the blog.
Yes, I’m still planning to do a new and much larger study that takes a “lateral look” at liblogs–but that won’t happen until next summer (and then only if things calm down). Until then, the only way to get the details on what happened to 86 liblogs since the summer of 2006 is to buy the book.
Will I do bound versions of Volumes 1-5? I’m not sure. It depends partly on whether Word will open issues before I changed typefaces without modifying them in a way that changes pagination; it depends partly on finishing the Academic Library Blogs book and getting other things on an even keel. Update, later in the afternoon: Doing a checktest, it’s clear that opening issues prior to 5:2 is a mess–some of the text reverts to the older typeface, most doesn’t. Therefore, it’s highly unlikely that I’ll do any more bound versions: It’s possible but not easy. (No, I can’t just put together the existing PDFs–they don’t embed some typefaces, so Lulu can’t accept the result.)
Meanwhile, Volume 6 is a keeper, and I can’t think of a better way to keep it (and to show your support for Cites & Insights).
Hmm. The combination of Cites & Insights 6: 2006 and Balanced Libraries: Thoughts on Continuity and Change make a great package on Library 2.0. No package price yet, though (unless I can figure out how to offer a discounted bundle at Lulu).
Here’s the cover.
