A lighter note...

Here's a link to some classic advice on dealing with the dissertation blues, which I first came across in a book entitled "Writing a Thesis"... I don't remember the author though.

http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1122129

And here's a poem which I clipped from "The Epigram", Bristol university's student paper:

The dissertation's fine and well;
My academic summit.
But social life has gone [to] hell (1)
____________________________
(1) My footnotes watched it plummet

Burroughs, D. (2008). The Epigram. Epigram, 128. 28th Jan.

The poetic image and the rhyme scheme is lovely; but I inserted the "to" in order to make it grammatically and poetically complete... I hope he checked his dissertation more carefully than his epigram!

Both of these little snippets currently grace the wall above my desk; hence the connection to my dissertation, which is progressing even now... slowly!

I'm halfway through the bloglist and checking all the start dates of the blogs. Tedious work but quite useful. Not much point doing a comparative study if they are all on different timescales, or if I don't compensate for this. Also it's handy to show longer-running vs better established blogs. I think the Del.icio.us list will be finished by Monday.

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I got a reply from Walt Crawford today too, after asking a bit about how he put together his two books on Academic and Public sector library blogs. I think I can safely say I have contacted pretty much everyone involved in this area of research, with a very few exceptions (authors of similiar papers). That's one of the nice things about doing this particular subject; it's very web-oriented and hence very connected.