Thanks to all who took my LIS Bloggers survey. I collected roughly 250 responses from Bibliobloggers from all over the world. So far, the results are very interesting! The questions about why we blog, community and the use of social tools yielded some intriguing data. Watch for more here as I mess with it.
One thing that rattled me at first and then seemed so incredibly right, was Steve Lawson’s post about my survey, where he copied his answers out of the survey and into a blog post. Pondering with Dr. O’Connor down at UNT over a great cup of tea last week, I wondered if I instead of a web survey I should have posted the questions at TTW and let them travel about the biblioblogosphere. What would the Institutional Review Board paperwork have looked like for that?!
So now, I am currently — for a December 1 deadline — creating a 20X30 poster I’ll be standing with at the “Works in Progress” Poster Session at the Association for Library and Information Science Education (ALISE) meeting in San Antonio, Texas this January. Here’s what I submitted to ALISE:
This poster describes a study in progress, featuring the results of a web-based survey identifying various demographics of librarians and library workers who write for professionally-focused blogs. The poster will present preliminary findings of the survey, including what types of library people are blogging and why they devote time to creating online content. A breakdown of librarians’ use of current online tools, such as RSS, tagging, and Flickr (identified as “social software”), will offer a view of where the library community falls in this new landscape. This research also investigates the formation of community through blogging and seeks to identify why library people blog.
This preliminary research could lead to the development of further questions as to how librarians use the new social software to improve library services, including the adoption of wikis, folksonomies and image tagging.