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The secret life of tattooed and bellydancing librarians is a fun column–by Shelley Howells, in the New Zealand Herald–that pays due tribute to librarian bloggers.

Ideally now, librarians can go on to the next step–encouraging nonlibrarians to blog. One place to start might be Friends of Libraries-type groups at the local level. Imagine library-related bloggers creating political support for libraries in their own cities (although the blogging lessons could be for all kinds of purposes, not just political activism, lest this rub local politicans the wrong way). Needless to say, too, librarians could offer blogging expertise to civic groups in general and, even more importantly, to local students and teachers.

Please note that I’m not suggesting that library-housed blogs are for everyone. But do you really think local censors are going to care that much about the local Lions Club’s blog on a cornea-donations program–or a biology teacher’s blog on local plant life (backed up with p-book references, complete with Dewey Decimal numbers!)?

Jeremy Frumkin certainly has the right idea in encouraging libraries to go beyond traditional services and offer blog space, among others. As storage spaces for community memories, library servers would be far more trustworthy than the commercial variety. Perhaps Jenny Levine, an early advocate of blog-mentoring, has already posted sentiments to this effect. If nothing else, librarians have an important role to play as bridges between a many-to-many medium like blogging and the world of more formal publishing, which, although encumbered with horridly obsolete business models, often can serve up solid information not available elsewhere. Pointing bloggers in the direction of the right links–including relevant citations of local libraries’ p-books–could work magic.

The time and money angle: We know that many if not most librarians have a shortage of both. However, maybe librarians could cut back slightly on their personal blogging to spend some off-hours time acquainting schools and local civic groups with the technology. Then with a few successful demo projects, especially ones linking to library resources, efforts could be made to come up with money to make blog-nurturing an official part of a library’s mission. At least as far as K-12 blogging, a Shifted Librarian item contains handy pointers for librarians, educators and others seeking more information on the topic.

The TeleRead take: Imagine the advantages that a national digital library system in the TeleRead vein could offer bloggers with truly stable links for books and articles–with access widely available to library users, as opposed to the items being locked behind passwords. In fact, that was the very first topic of the TeleRead Web log. Agreements with database vendors, on the link front, is a good start–it’s already happening to some extent. But the real solution, from a long-term archival perspective, would be for the items to be available on library-controlled servers themselves.

Related: Read a great how-not-to lesson from LISNews on a clueless, purple-haired consultant who reportedly told Colleyville, TX, to toss out its paper library books. Stupidity like this is neither library evolution nor revolution. It’s library destruction.

(New Zealand column found via Library Stuff.)

 
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