The Corporate Librarian

So I finally buckled down and read through Walt Crawford’s The Liblog Landscape 2007-2008. I’ll doubtless be re-reading it, underlining passages and circling tables and whatnot, but these are preliminary reactions.

First, let me say how great it is to see someone who tests hypotheses with data. And in a thoughtful way, not just reporting averages and percentages context-free and sitting back and waiting for the applause. Walt’s transparent about his methodology and why he made the choices he did.

Second, it’s nice to see someone who admits when their initial hypotheses don’t match the data. Yeah, I’m looking at you, Chris Anderson.

Now that I’ve doubtless convinced the readers I’m sucking up, on to a few more substantive notes.

• I’m curious how figure use differs from the larger ‘blogosphere.’
• I was surprised at the lack of significant correlation (0.3 or greater) between age of blog and any other metric.
• It’s damn hard to measure visibility nowadays, since both Technorati and Google Blog Search include blogrolls (Walt discusses how he tried to reduce this in a 2006 study, as well as changes to his methodology since), and Bloglines has had its hiccups. Don’t even get me started on Feedburner.
• I wonder (and worry, some) why liblogs declined at a slower rate than the ‘blogosphere’ as a whole – Is it that there’s a regular influx from library schools? Is it the innate conservatism when it comes to technology of many academics, so that they were late to come to blogging and will be late to leave it? Is it that people are more aware of how to promote blogs (and more able to) than microblogs? More optimistically, is it that librarians found a tool they liked and didn’t feel the need to chase after the New Shiny? Walt’s take seems to be that blogs have matured as tools and are being used to good effect, so perhaps I’m worrying over nothing. It wouldn’t be the first time.

Next up I’ll actually take the time to look through the blog profiles and see if I can draw any useful conclusions regarding corporate, non-law, non-medical library blogs.

I haven’t actually ponied up for this yet – some unexpected expenses plus the onset of Tinselkrieg have forced me to postpone a few things – but I do want to take a look and see if there are any conclusions one can draw in terms of multi-year trends.

A few items of note from Primary Research Group’s press release:

• Companies in the oil/gas and pharmaceuticals industries accounted for many of the libraries which reported increased budgets in 2008. In the Bay Area there’s been at least one large (and controversial) pharma library closing that I know of, so interesting to see this.
• The median amount of time spent reviewing content vendor license contract terms was 30 hours (the mean was 117.2).
• Average spending on ebooks (I assume mean, rather than median) was slightly less than half as much as was spent on print books.
• Over 29% of respondents said the library has become more important to competitive intelligence research efforts (compared with 20% who said it had become less important). Of course, this could also be reported as “About half of libraries said the library had not changed its importance to competitive intelligence research efforts,” but that’s not going to sell studies.

I’ve commented on past editions of the study here and here, and you can find out more on the latest edition here.

Disclaimer: I ‘know’ Walt as someone who hangs out on the same Meebo room as me.

Walt Crawford’s announced on his blog and a few mailing lists the availability of his study of 607 blogs written by ‘library people.’ Being me, I’m curious to see if there are any interesting trends regarding corporate librarian blogs, but it looks like Walt’s put a lot of work into this – slicing the data by nationality, authorship and other criteria, looking at trends over time, comparing the biblioblogosphere (or liblogosphere, if you prefer) to the wider blogosphere.

Being a selfish bastard, I hope he has enough success with this to keep doing it on a regular basis. I might do a post on some of the corporate librarian stuff I notice, but since he’s doing a series of posts on the contents I don’t want to step on his toes, so it will likely be a while. So check it out on Lulu (and Amazon, if and when it’s available there! It’s rare to see this kind of analysis outside of academic journals, and it’s something that should be encouraged.