In the thick of the final edit

I am now in the thick of the final edit. This is a good place to be, because it means I will soon (27th November!) be ready to submit the dissertation, and this blog will have reached its goal!

See you then. I will post a dissertation-submission celebratory posting, and a nostalgic look back at the months of effort and insights.

I'm still here!

This blog has gone a bit stale, I know, but I've been rather busy in the real world and haven't got much dissertation news at all!

To be frank, I've been working on the write-up and it's fairly mechanical stuff. I've even taken to setting a timer and working in 30min bursts with quite generous breaks in between just to keep motivation up. I've found it's better to leave myself "hungry" between "shifts" rather than glut myself on writing. Anyhow my brain seems to work quite well like this; the breaks allow some subconscious processing to take place in between the "real" work.

I was a bit unsure as to whether my data really gave me enough to say anything meaningful. But some conversation with my supervisor and reading a few more past dissertations convinced me I'm on the right track, and I don't need to produce PhD level stuff at this stage. So, it's going nicely.

Working on the Methodology today and re-jigging my previous unstructured material into a logical storyline and updating it to reflect what I actually did instead of what I expected to do!

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!

Hello World!

This is an unofficial blog documenting an Information and Library Management Masters project.

The subject of the project is "blogging in UK academic libraries". The method is content analysis.

I aim to produce a substantial overview of this sector's blogging activity, including a directory of all openly-accessible blogs.

If you are active in this area or would like to know more, please get in touch.

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The story so far

I've compiled an initial list of UK blogs. It's long! One problem may be the sheer length of the list. Although I want to go for completeness, time is a major factor since I want to finish this project by the end of August 2008.

Also, I have reviewed pretty much all the literature I want to review (not in any great depth, but since most of it is fairly basic content analysis, there's not much depth to plumb!). There's a surprisingly large amount, although like the biblioblogosphere itself, it's a minority interest and hugely self-referencing.

The interesting thing is the methodology of these content analyses of blogs. It ranges from the truly minimal to the quite technical (and actually one author was responsible for both extremes!).

I don't think I'm ready at the moment to do major statistical analysis, but I am hoping that either

1. It won't be necessary and I can do an initial exploratory exposition... or...
2. I can learn it quickly enough! Hopefully my supervisor will advise on this when the time comes. There should be some software to help out in this day and age.

Another good point is that I contacted someone at another University who's doing the same project, basically, but for the public library sector. So we should be able to keep in touch and collaborate a bit (in a fair and transparent way, of course!).

I've also (hopefully) got the previous study which I'm basing mine on in the post to me... so the methodology should be (almost) sorted by next week. Methodology, that's what it's all about!

Since I'm now waiting for a supervisor to be allocated to me, I'm thinking I'll take the weekend (and part of next week!) off. I need some nice ideas for things to do though.