DIY Librarian

In “Hustle and Flow”, his March 15, 2006 column for Library Journal, Roy Tennant makes some comments about blogs that I’ve taken the liberty of tweaking:

Blogs Newspapers are tailored to maximize the power of flow. The only blogs newspapers that are read are those that post publish new content regularly. This new content is streamed seamlessly to the reader’s favorite current awareness tool subscriber’s doorstep.

Users tend to focus solely on the new, and although blogging software the newspaper format makes it easy to assign posts articles to topical categories of the blogger’s editor’s own invention, it’s not clear that readers use those categories for much of anything old business sections for anything other than birdcage lining.

Tennant’s conclusion still holds true, however:

Current awareness is a useful goal. But being able to locate something you’ve seen before can be important as well. So we must collect, organize, provide access to, and preserve the best of this information and content flow.

Really, we’ve been doing this for a long time. The only problem is that with the ease of publishing on the Internet, there is so much more information flowing past us. And, as we’ve seen with newspaper indexing and preservation efforts, it’s not always easy to know what will be useful to the scholars of the future.