Blogs Related to Mine

Now that my blog has been created, the next assignment for my ISAR class is to find a blog related to mine and share it here. My blog is about law librarianship so I wanted to find a blog related directly to law librarianship if I could, or to law libraries generally. I used Google’s service, GoogleBlog (http://blogsearch.google.com), for my search. I tried several different search terms, including "law libraries" and "law librarians," in order to see whether my search results would differ in number of hits or relevance. In terms of relevance, I saw many of the same blogs at the top of the results using each query. I also tried a few other search engines, but in the end, I was happiest with the results provided by GoogleBlog. Many of the blogs were those of law libraries, especially academic law libraries at law schools. These had information which concerned legal developments, legal literature, and issues specific to law libraries in general in a few instances. However, most of these blogs had postings that were concerned with matters related only to the particular host law library (i.e., events to be held at that specific library, new titles acquired there, etc.)

I was happy to find several blogs related specifically to law librarianship or issues impacting law libraries generally. My favorite among these was Law Librarian Blog, (A Member of the Law Professors Blog Network). This is a wonderful blog whose contributing editors are law librarians from libraries and institutions across the country. It is just over four years old and has logged over 1,000,000 page views. There are useful links to legal articles and primary source information of interest to legal professionals, information about new technologies and information resources, upcoming conferences or events for law librarians, law librarian job openings and more. There's even a link to Bonnie Shucha's Directory of more than 100 other law library blogs. (http://library.law.wisc.edu/wisblawg/blogslistpublic.htm) The blog search feature and topical archives were also very helpful. I have posted an excerpt from the blog below which demonstrates the topical relevance of the blog to my own.

Excerpt from Law Librarian Blog webpage located at: http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/law_librarian_blog/

New Report on Emerging Information Technologies In their 2009 “Horizon Report,” EDUCAUSE and the New Media Consortium report on six emerging technologies likely to impact education (and implicitly, libraries) in the near future. The report discusses all-in-one mobile devices, cloud computing, geographic data, personalized Web media, new Semantic Web tools, and physical objects made “smart” by sensors and identifiers. Hat tip to Roy Tennant.

Robert Richards
January 27, 2009 in Information Technology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Carnegie Report Co-Author Identifies Opportunities for Academic Law Librarians Judith Welch Wegner (North Carolina), co-author of Educating Lawyers: Preparation for the Profession of Law ("Carnegie Report"), writes that "law librarians have an opportunity to enhance their teaching and institutional contributions as part of a broad effort to improve the preparation of lawyers." in Teaching Legal Research: Educating Lawyers, AALL Spectrum (February 2009). She outlines seven challenges and associated possibilities for law librarians.

[JH]
January 27, 2009 in Legal Research Instruction | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

150 Law Library/Librarian Blogs and Counting Bonnie Shucha (UW Law Library) has updated her directory of law library/librarian blogs. As of Jan. 9th there was 150 active blogs. Great job Bonnie!

[JH]
January 21, 2009 in Web Communications | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

A few additional blogs that I found had very good information for law librarians were Law Lib Tech, http://www.lawlibtech.com/ (concerning library technology and knowledge management), and AALL Spectrum Blog, http://aallspectrum.wordpress.com/ (a blog from the monthly magazine of the American Association of Law Libraries). Of the many academic law library blogs, one of my favorites was the "Goodson Blogson" from the Goodson Law Library of Duke University at http://dukelawref.blogspot.com. I am very happy to have found these useful law librarian blogs and to have them stored here for my future reference. I look forward to reading them regularly.