Blogs

When Mark asked me to write about our use of Drupal at the Dickinson College Archives and Special Collections, the first thing I thought about was when our Archives Reference Blog was initially launched in April 2007. I couldn't believe that it has been two years already. I am pleased to report that my colleagues at Dickinson and I are enormously happy with the results of those two years. I hope others may find this brief explanation of how and why we are using Drupal as a reference management tool to be helpful and instructive.

The concept for our implementation of Drupal was a simple one. I was thinking about the fact that we help researchers everyday to locate information that they want, but that what they discover among our collections or learn from them seldom gets shared, except by those who write for publication. So, what if we shared via the web, through a simple blog format, the basic questions posed by our researchers along with a simple summary of the results? Wouldn't that provide an additional access point by which a future user might stumble across our resources, being led to materials that might otherwise have been overlooked? It certainly seemed worth a try, so we talked with our IT colleagues about starting an archives reference blog.

It's been some time since I've had a substantive post, and I don't really intend to write one now. I figured I should mention, however, that I've been featured lately in print and in the blogosphere. Jessamyn West of librarian.net interviewed me for an article ("Saving Digital History") in Library Journal netConnect. In addition, I was tapped by the wonderful folks at Booktruck for the latest installment in their "Ask a Male Librarian" series. I swear someday soon I'll write something much more interesting and less self-promotional.

I won't bother waiting to be tagged to do this, because all the cool kids already are. I read too many blogs already, so here we go.

• Mary Eats is, as one would easily assume, a blog about food. Mary started the blog while she and her husband were living in Korea, and thus there's an overwhelming emphasis on Korean food and restaurants. She moved to Seattle relatively recently and began culinary school, too. My two favorite parts of this blog are when she makes videos and when she makes comics, like this one about konbu.
• Language Log is a blog written by linguistics faculty from around the world, wherein they tackle important and not-so-important issues like linguistic prescriptivism, 419 scammers, the Pirahà language, and cheese steak rolls served at Chinese restaurants in Philadelphia, all with a good sense of humor.
• Information Aesthetics covers all sorts of stuff related to information visualization. Essentially, it's just one massive blog full of data porn, from treemaps to Youtube videos using Isotype symbols. I'd almost suggest that this might be considered a library blog on account of the fact that some of this stuff was my favorite stuff to learn about but not pursue in detail during library school.
• AfriGadget updates infrequently, but when it does, it covers the ingenuity of African bricolage to solve everyday problems. It's a good counterpoint to Make, because many of the things these guys create address important life necessities rather than simple curiosity.
• Finally, Hel-Looks covers on-the-street fashion in Helsinki, which is often infinitely more interesting than what most Americans (even hipsters) try to pull off.