Comments of LIS Blogs

(Article Review)

            Blogging has gained great popularity among all sorts of professionals and non-professionals around the world. Blogs and blogosphere have given ‘freedom to write’ to all those who know to use computer keyboard and a little bit internet. As of septmeber 2008, more than 133 million blogs appeared in the blogosphere (Technorati, 2008). According to NDTV there are an estimated 40,000 regular bloggers in India (The Hindu 25 June, 2008) and 3,00,000 words are blogged per minutes on the largest search engine site, Google (Times of India 28, July 2010). As any other professionals, librarians also have found their own space in the blogosphere. By the end of 1990s, some librarians launched professional blogs which focused on LIS news, emerging technologies and methods of improving library services (Stephens 2008).

            Facility to comment on the blog posts is one of the main attractions of blogging. A study about the comments on LIS blogs, conducted by Noa Aharony, LIS lecturer in Bar-Ilan university of Israel, has been published in the Libri Jounal (V. 60, March 2010)*. The study contains analysis of comments which appeared in 30 LIS blogs in August-October 2008. The researcher has conducted two phase analysis such as 1) statistical descriptive analysis and 2) content analysis. The study reveals that 18 blogs had 0-50 comments per blog, 7 blogs had the highest percentage of posts with comments 91-100%. In case of average comments per post, 26 blogs had 0-10 comments per post while 1 blog had more than 40 comments per post, further, in 23 blogs the comments were written by anonymous comment- writers.

            In case of languages, 90.29% of comment-writers use personal languages. Information like personal (34.19%), advisory (17.75%), reflective (17.72%), impressive (15.60%) and courtesy and politeness (13.70%) are being presented through comments. In addition to this, content of comments distributed among library issues (23.58%), technology issues (23.58%), web 2.0 (16.50%), general librarianship (5.66%) open access issues (2.83%) and conference (0.94%). This study reveals that most of the blog’s readers are passive and do not comment or contribute content to blog.   At the other hand, the LIS blog readers who participate and add comments to the posts took advantage of this platform and discuss topics which are relevant to librarians’ work and profession. The writing of the comments enables them rethink, reflect, evaluate, and reconsider professional issues and to share it with their colleagues. The author concludes that the current findings add a new dimension to LIS blogosphere. It is not only the LIS bloggers who deal with professional issues in their blogs, but it is also the readers who add comments, write, and discuss professional topics. It seems that both the bloggers and their readers exploit their medium for dissemination of professional information as well as for sharing their experience and thought.

*Aharony, Nao. LIS blog comments: An exploratory analysis. Libri. Vol 60, pp 65-77,   March 2010.

Author’s E-mail: aharonn1@mail.biu.ac.il