How Many Thousand Words per Essay?

There. I’ve added “blog” and “blogging” to my MSWord dictionary, so now they must be real, right?

The University of Minnesota Library, for one, encourages and supports blogging (with instruction, by providing templates), suggesting even that one’s blog is a good place to work out paper drafts. This, is where they collect critical essays on blogging.

Ian Winship writes in Update (May 2004) about ways libraries can and do use blogs: to announce new resources, to comment on publishing and technology current events, as a bulletin board for library news, and to solicit the ever-popular user comments. (I hereby predict that “user needs” will appear in every comps essay I write.) Especially if I had a job in a university setting, I would make certain the library had a blog – or an RSS feed might be even better. To the extent that the latter is one-stop reading and can digest things, letting the reader choose when to get more details, it might be the best way to keep reminding library users how the library can help them. (For more on uses of RSS, see this courtesy of AK .)

Leslie Barban (Public Libraries, March/April 2003) wrote that public librarians should boast of their ability to sell free books – to help every reader find his/her book, every book its reader (okay, that’s Ranganathan, 1953, I think). Just broaden the thought to “information.” A library’s RSS or blog would be a good way to remind people that librarians are experts in finding, evaluating, organizing, and preserving information.

To do this effectively, a blog would have to follow good website design criteria. In their library information systems text, Kochtanek and Matthews pull together many such checklists. In general, they find these to be important: be concise, keep links live, use few graphics (don’t widen the digital divide by putting up lots of stuff only a few can access), use a readable text size, leave lots of white space, 2 or 3 colors is probably plenty, and keep it up to date.

Searching

Speaking of blogs, if you keep one and want to find again something you linked to “a while back” you know about the need for a good organizational system. Date written is a pretty weak way to organize. I remember the subject – a website that creates a Places Visited map – not the date. Well, I did find it, and I used it to draft a map of Cuisines We Sampled. Folks, let me know what I forgot or got wrong.



create your own visited countries map


Homeward Bound

Southbound on 14th Street last night, a red light left me nearly centered on the Regan building. The mourning bunting did give me pause, though I am no fan.

I95 had a high percentage of non-regulars, many the slow-and-steady type, but two black SUVs from New Jersey, with onboard TVs, passed me on the right at 80 mph, easily.

Pretty full moon, though.