Some tidbits.

I have found some handy hints on writing up.

And dragged up a useful content analysis guide from my bookmarks on my old pc :s

Ah, well. Back to the data trawling tomorrow. I had a great birthday party last night so I've been taking it easy!

Don't say I never give you anything!

There, the Del.icio.us list is done, and done. All that hard work is now yours for the viewing.

You can view the Big List at http://del.icio.us/ukbiblioblogosphere

The alphabetic tag list shows the blogs sorted into letter categories as well; I tagged them under initial letter (basically following the www.hero.ac.uk list of universities) as well as their city name.

The frequency listing is good for seeing which unis have the most blogs; however, this doesn't indicate how "fresh" they are, if indeed they have any posts at all!

Interesting facts so far:

• Total UK academic library blogs listed on Del.icio.us: 135 (!)
• Most prolific blogging university library: Warwick (19 blogs)
• Strangest UK academic library blog: "Thing of the Day" at Portsmouth.

And a good night to all, that's quite enough for one day!

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.

Simply Del.icio.us!

I'm working on a Del.icio.us tagged and alphabetised link list of UK academic library blogs. It will eventually appear here:

http://del.icio.us/ukbiblioblogosphere

I was thinking of keeping the links I'm adding currently private, and check the situation with regards to sharing my research, as this is actually part of the finished work, in the sense of a blog directory and descriptive metadata.

However, then I thought since I'm not really giving away much more than the list, I will put it up. I hope it's helpful to people and also that anyone who can update it will contact me with their new details!

If you have any good ideas or can point me to a resource that deals with this kind of issue, please feel free to let me know in the comments box. After all, this is a project about a social medium so I am keen to share as much as possible - however, the limit would be putting all my draft write-ups online (there are some already!) but I don't think that would go down too well with my university.

I'd also welcome any thoughts on how to analyse the blogs!