A very special (and very long) Cites & Insights is now available: Volume 10, Issue 10, September/October 2010.
It’s at http://citesandinsights.info/civ10i10.pdf, if you’re not seeing the links.
The 60-page issue (which, at 1.5MB, may take a little longer than usual to download) is PDF-only and consists of one essay:
But Still They Blog: The Liblog Landscape 2007-2009
Except for a few paragraphs (most of page 56), this is taken entirely from the book But Still They Blog: The Liblog Landscape 2007-2009, which is still available. Page 56 summarizes what’s not in the issue–a few graphs, one column of quite a few tables, a substantial portion of one text-only chapter…and all 521 liblog profiles.
Pages 57-60 contain an index to liblog names and people’s names within the issue–since it came directly from the Word document used for the book, it was easy to create a new index (the book index uses W0rd’s internal indexing features), and a group of advisers from that august body, the Library Society of the World, encouraged me to include it.
Since the issue includes dozens of tables and a fair number of graphs, and since it would be vastly longer in printed-HTML form, no HTML version is provided.
Does “September/October” mean there won’t be an issue for another two months?
It means this is three times as long as my target size for issues and twice as long as most actual issues. It means there might not be another issue before the November 2010 issue…depending on a whole bunch of other things.
Meanwhile, enjoy. And to the 17 people and libraries who actually purchased the book to date: Thanks. I hope a few others join you. There’s a bunch of good stuff in the book that isn’t in this issue.
I am over 80% of the way through reading this issue. I have a commnet on the Rachel Singer Gordon’s remarks that she gets more comments on her “non-library” blog.
I have not tracked the comments I have received on “library posts” vs. “non-library posts,” but I do have an observation. In the late 1990s, I ran a multi-type library organization and I also had a year as the President of the state library association. In both cases, I had a monthly column to write. I tackled various library issues of the day, but often ended with some personal note or another. For the library association it often covered things with my car, which I drove around the state, and hit 100,000 miles that year. I received many more comments, and had much more conversation about the personal stuff than the library stuff.
I think that is because it is the personal stuff that helps to bind us together. We feel we know each other better because we can relate to the car issues, or in your case, enjoy learning more about solar power and how it could be applied on a personal level.
So, I think my observation back to Rachel is that part of why she does not get as many comments on the library blog, is that those folks get to comment to her on FriendFeed and/or Twitter, *in addition to* the fact that folks will comment on the personal as part of the social glue.