The American Archivist Article on Weblogs
I want it on the record that I /finally/ got to a library with a subscription to The American Archivist to photocopy the article about blogging that was in the spring and summer issue: Diaries, Online Diaries and the Future Loss to Archives; or, Blogs and the Blogging Bloggers Who Blog Them by Catherine O’Sullivan. I plan to read it over the weekend.
(v’s probably smiling right about … now.)
I swear I mentioned its existence in this space before, but I can’t find the post now. The article does not seem to be available online.
Addendum 10/21: I finally read the article about what archives might want to do with weblogs as potential acquisitions. The first ten pages gives a nice history of the trend of journaling. It’s nice to know that many purposes of diary keeping cross into our world with blogs. Catherine O’Sullivan’s discussion reinforces the value of personal accounts and memoirs. She mentions some well-known diarists, including Samuel Pepys, whose diary might be even more famous now because of its weblog version. I was hoping she’d say more about its weblog format than just a mention in the footnotes. I would have liked for the article to push further into some of the issues surrounding what archives might want and be able to do with weblogs. O’Sullivan mentions a number of important issues, but doesn’t explore them too deeply. Just the technological considerations alone could fill another twenty pages. The article is a great starting point, though, for archives mulling the importance of weblogs and what might be involved in keeping them. It’s definitely a key contribution to the scholarly literature about blogging.
October 19th, 2005 at 11:34 am
I’m curious what you thought of the article. I read it this spring, so forgive my vagary, but I recall being rather disappointed in it. It seemed rather commonsensical; I guess I was looking for answers about capturing and archiving blogs and the article seemed to only be alerting people to the fact that blogs are beginning to replace diaries…
October 19th, 2005 at 5:23 pm
Well, uh, I, uh, haven’t exactly finished reading it yet …
But soon … soon, I hope … I’m actually on the second page now …
I’m such a slacker about these things …
March 6th, 2006 at 7:21 pm
I read this article as well. It is the first article that I have seen that explored how to preserve blogs. I do wish O’Sullivan had offered more suggestions for how to preserve blogs, but I guess when you are one of the first to write on a topic, it sometimes goes that way. I think she raises several topics for further research, especially in regards to the legality of preserving blogs. For what it’s worth, if RSS feeds are configured properly, they offer real potential for preserving blogs. An archivist could save large amounts of content in one RSS file. The problem is, most bloggers have their RSS feeds configured to only hold 10 or so entries that often do not have the entire contents of posts.