Library Juice Slams Librarians Who Blog
Two of my blog readers e-mailed me about this issue of Library Juice’s “Please stop being excited about the Web - especially ‘blogs” because they found it so disturbing.
This paragraph in particular seems to be raising hackles:
“As an example I would like to cite the blogging craze - and it is a craze in its current form - because so many people, librarians included, have started their own blogs for no discernible reason and through blogs have renewed their irrational excitement about the Web in general. It appears to me that in most cases where someone has started a blog that is useful, it would be more useful if it were not a blog but a website with a different structure. I say this because if there is one thing that is essential about blogs, that they all have in common, it is not the ease of updating them, not RSS feeds, not the ability to post comments, and not the capability of having a community of users add content. It is the chronological structure. Many people are now using the blog format where a chronological organization is not appropriate to the content they are putting up, for no other reason than that blogs are hot and there are services supporting them. This is irrational. I feel that librarians should be a little more mature and less inclined to fall for Internet crazes like this. That is not to say that a blog is never a useful thing,
only that blogs - as everything on the web - should be seen for what they are and not in terms of a pre-existing enthusiasm.”
I agree that a chronological structure is not appropriate for organizing many kinds of information. It is the primary way many blogs organize content. I am fortunate enough to blog on two systems that offer categories as well as chronological structure to aid in navigation. Until blog programmers come up with another primary scheme for organizing content, it’s what we have. Should librarians completely shirk this incredibly useful technology because some people don’t like the chronological structure? I certainly don’t think so. Instead, I think we should work with some programmers on developing a different way to organize blog posts. Some systems already offer alternative organizational structures.
Also, if librarians don’t get into some of the Internet crazes, how are we going to learn about new technologies and how we can use them in our work?
Rowland Institute librarian Garrett Eastman also blogged a response.
