Dutch Blogger Picks Up the Librarianesque Session
Too bad I can’t read Dutch.
Another blogger writing in a foreign language that seemed Germanic pointed to me a few days ago. I can’t find the link or remember who it was now. I think the jist of the post was something about librarians not knowing what blogs are.
Addendum 4/29: Check out Jort’s translation. Thanks, Jort!
Addendum 5/5: This is wild: I was playing around on Frassle today and discovered Gerard commented on this post as it appears on the mirror in Frassle. Gerard corrects my interpretation of his post.
I wonder how many other people have commented on the manifestation of this blog in Frassle that I don’t see because there isn’t a direct relationship between what’s there in Frassle and what’s here on this blog.
April 28th, 2004 at 8:33 am
Hey J, since you mentioned my blog (which is good, I need some publicity
) I decided to translate the Dutch article. I can do this, as I am Dutch, haha
BloggerCon Librarianesque
Haven’t had the change to catch much of BloggerCon II, but one session did manage to get my attention, if only because of the nice title: BloggerCon Librarianesque
Some quotes from moderator Jessica Baumgart’s report: …Several librarians, like Susan Herzog and Jessamyn West, talked about blogs as a way to market a library, its resources, and events. Someone pointed out that people doing Web searches could end up on any page of the library’s blog and learn about their local library, which could be especially useful for people who don’t usually use the library…
…Christina Pikas from Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Lab talked about using her library’s weblog to establish her credentials. By writing weblog entries and pointing out useful resources, she’s letting her community know she’s available and knowledgeable about the field. She thinks it might be a way to attract new clients and encourage others to use the library because of her expertise…
These ideas certainly make sense and could be applied to the Dutch situation as well. It goes both ways: the information specialist that blogs can finally prove to be an authority on certain content. At the same time the (often expensive) online collections of university and college libraries are put to much better use. How? If more information specialists refer to quality sources in their weblogs, these postings will be picked up by Google and get a higher ranking in search results. Under the motto ‘If you can’t beat them, join them’, the biggest competitor is turned into a tool.
It seems that there is still a long way to go, because as far as I know there is not a single Dutch library that has its own weblog. Even though it seems obvious that individual librarians/information specialists would blog themselves, they are sparse. Or they are hard to find, because so far I only found one weblogging colleague http://internetviewer.web-log.nl/). And that pales in comparison to this list: http://www.libdex.com/weblogs.html
April 29th, 2004 at 5:06 pm
@jort: good job, Jort! Couldn’t have done it better myself.