In memoriam: Laurel Anne Clyde

If there were to be a sort of hero or saint of the biblioblogosphere, my vote would go to the late Dr. Laurel Anne Clyde.

Her book, "Weblogs in Libraries" is the only scholarly monograph exclusively on this subject that I know of. OK, OK, there are also Mr. Crawford's great books but there are in a different style!

I've been reviewing her literature on the subject today, and there is quite a lot of it! She sort of pioneered the content analysis methods that have been used so far, and was a big advocate of taking this technology seriously in the library context.

If not for her untimely passing away, I'm sure I would have got in touch with her somehow for help with my research! As it is, this project will ultimately be dedicated to her memory.

Reviewing the literature

I have done quite a bit of background reading for this project already, since about 3 or 4 months ago, in fact!

However, until the last few days (i.e. since my first supervision!) I have realised that I wasn't doing a literature review - I was just reading.

Maybe I could claim to have done background reading and made some pretty good notes, but I haven't really reviewed the literature.

Today I ploughed through the whole of Michael Stephens' PhD on library blogging! This was a great experience, because he touches on most points that could possibly be relevant to any study of blogging. Plus, his methodology involved content analysis (more qualitative than what I want to do, but giving me some good pointers).

Plus his literature review is such a good example of the genre that I am now itching to get going with mine. The notes I made as I read pretty much re-structured my entire vision of the lit. review, and I can't wait to get it down on paper... or rather, in pixels.

Freshness

Looks at first glance that most of the blogs are actually quite "fresh" - i.e. they have a post in the last 3 months, if not this month or even this week.

At least this criterion filters out pretty much all of the abandonned blogs. Maybe a stricter criterion or a random sample is needed to ensure feasibility. My time will be limited once I start work next month.

I'm beginning to lean towards using the same kind of scheme as Lee and Bates' paper, since that seems to be a pretty acceptable technique, even in a PhD paper. As long as I am applying their technique to a new dataset, a new geographical area and a new sector, I think I am very much producing something original.