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!

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.

---

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.