Walt at Random

First the pitch:

Buy the book!

The Liblog Landscape 2007-2008: A Lateral Look.

This 285-page 6×9 trade paperback looks at 607 liblogs (nearly all English-language) and, for most of them, how they’ve changed from 2007 to 2008.

It’s the most comprehensive look at liblogs ever done–and the only one I know of that shows how they’re changing from year to year.

From now through January 15, 2009, and only from Lulu, The Liblog Landscape 2007-2008 is available for $22.50 plus shipping.

On January 16 or thereabouts, that price will go up to $35.00. If and when the book is available on Amazon, it will immediately sell for $35.00.

Why there’s not more personal commentary and evaluation

At least a couple of you have said you were looking forward to my comments about blogs–and, at least on the individual level, I’m afraid you’ll be disappointed.

The book includes lots of comments about how liblogs work in the aggregate and how they’re changing. The first 11 chapters are very much in my voice and include my opinions.

But I don’t attempt to discuss what bloggers are posting about–that’s just too complicated and too transitory. To be honest, with some of the more prolific blogs, I was just marking-and-counting: Adding up the number of posts, comments and figures, and measuring total word count, but not really reading each post. (Hey, the blogs included more than 22,000 posts during March-May 2007 and more than 19,000 during March-May 2008. I’m a fast reader, but that’s a lot of reading–more than 9.5 million words, or the equivalent of at least 95 good-size books.)

As I was building the preliminary version of Chapter 12–that is, building the profile for each liblog as I measured its metrics, knowing I’d go back and fill in some derivative measures later on–I was adding a brief evaluative comment in some cases: One or two sentences describing the blog’s nature as I saw it during the 2008 period.

I wound up stripping out all of those comments for four reasons:

1. In a few cases (maybe half a dozen?), I didn’t feel I could include a comment because I really didn’t like the blog (or some aspects of the blog, or disliked the blogger)–and I’d already decided to follow the “grandmother rule” (If I couldn’t say anything nice, I wouldn’t say anything at all.)
2. In a lot of cases (scores of them), I didn’t find that I had anything useful to say, because the blog was in an area I don’t understand very well or for other reasons.
3. As I worked my way through, I found my comments becoming less and less useful.
4. The killer: Those comments would take up at least 100 pages of the book, probably more like 150 pages. Maybe it might make sense to write “Walt’s BIG Book of Liblogs” some day, but this isn’t the day. I was hoping to keep the book under 300 pages (and finally succeeded, partly by using slightly smaller type) and certainly wanted to keep it under 400 pages.

But still…

Part of me wants to do that part–but I think it would be a separate book. Is that book worth doing? Am I the right one to do it? (Would I be able to keep on as even a part-time participant in the library field after doing it?)

Damned if I know. For now, I’m not sure how I’d go about it. The task of categorizing and judging 19,000 posts is far beyond me, I think; the task of providing useful evaluative comments on even 500 blogs–well, possible, but I’m not yet sure how.

We shall see. Meanwhile,

What’s here, the remainder

Here are the remaining liblogs included, with the number of times each appears in the index.

• Thoughts from Carl Grant [2]
• Thus Spoke Pragmatic Librarian [2]
• Tinfoil + Raccoon [3]
• Tiny Little Librarian [5]
• Tom Keays :: Blog [1]
• Tom Roper’s Weblog [4]
• Tombrarian [3]
• Travelin’ Librarian [9]
• Travels with the State Librarian [1]
• Twilight Librarian [2]
• Typo of the day for librarians [6]
• UBC Academic Search – Google Scholar Blog [9]
• The Ubiquitous Librarian [4]
• UK Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Blog [1]
• UK Web Focus [6]
• ulo.tricho.us [2]
• uncaged librarian [3]
• Union Librarian [1]
• User Education Resources for Librarians [4]
• userslib.com [4]
• The Utopian Library [6]
• Vagabondages [8]
• The Vampire Librarian [6]
• Vancouver Law Librarian Blog [3]
• Virtual librariesinteract.info [2]
• virtually a librarian [1]
• The Vital Library [5]
• walking paper [7]
• Walt at Random [6]
• A Wandering Eyre [2]
• Wanderings of an online librarian [1]
• Wanderings… [2]
• washtublibrarian [1]
• the wee librarian [2]
• Weibel Lines [4]
• The Well Dressed Librarian [10]
• What I Learned Today… [5]
• Wigblog – Things Internet and Otherwise by Richard Wiggins [4]
• wiredfu [1]
• Wireless Libraries [2]
• With Strings Attached [3]
• WoW! Wouter on the Web [1]
• WoW! Wouter over het Web [6]
• Writings of the Loud Librarian…. [5]
• yes to know [6]
• Young Librarian [3]
• Your Neighborhood Librarian [7]
• Z666.7.L364 (www.jenniferlang.net) [2]
• Zee Says=Film Addict + Teen Librarian [4]
• The Zenformation Professional [7]
• zydeco fish [7]
• Zzzoot [4]

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008 at 11:29 am and is filed under C&I Books, Liblogs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.