Putting Law Librarian Blog in Perspective

By most accounts, 2004 was the "Year of the Blog" in web communications. In that year, Professor Paul Caron (Cincinnati) and I founded the Law Professor Blogs Network, of which by this post Law Librarian Blog is now a member.

Blogs are no longer just vehicles for personal expression, ones offering up whatever bloggers feel like writing about. The Post is much more than that now.

Creating the first commercial network of law blogs is our way of hinting that we believe the end of the beginning of the blogging phenomenon is at hand. The blogosphere is being commercialized just like more traditional websites were several years ago. Certainly, individuals will continue keyboarding personal opinions and certainly blogs will continue to explode onto the scene to cover significant events (e.g., the 2004 presidential campaigns and the Tsunami of December 26, 2004) but eventually group-based RSS feeds, including a network of multiple editor blogs such as ours, will be the primary providers of content to everyone's news readers.

No less a law blog authority than Dennis Kennedy recognized this when, on December 26, 2004, he explained his reasoning for characterizing Group Blogs as the "Best Legal Blog Trend of 2004."

"... 2004 saw the appearance of a number of group blogging experiments by both new bloggers and long-time bloggers. I like this trend because it offers the potential of providing better content to a bigger audience and may open up revenue opportunities."

We joined this nascent trend on April 15, 2004 with the publication of TaxProf Blog and by early December of 2004, the eight blogs that made up the Network at the time surpassed one-million page views. We are a commercial (ad)venture, one through which we are participating in what fellow blogger, Professor Douglas A. Berman (OSU), editor of Sentencing Law & Policy, describes as "scholarship in action." Blogging in a professional discipline is akin to communicating in that "informal college" we learned about in library school so many decades ago with one all important different -- access to all who reside on this side of the "digital divide."

About This Blog. Law Librarian Blog combines both (1) continuously-updated permanent resources and (2) daily news and information for practicing law librarians and other professionals interested in legal research and bibliography. Notwithstanding the above "state of the blogosphere" rant, this blog is not a collection of ruminations about the latest issues in librarianships as a profession, law libraries, legal publishing, or information policy. Like all blog editors in the Law Professor Blogs Network, I leave that terrain to the many existing blogs with that mission.

NB: we make no pretense to be The Law Librarian Blog. Our network's naming convention requires us to name our blog this way. I certainly make no claim to be the best law librarian for this blog, just the one most readily available at this time. With this post, Law Librarian Blog is simply joining what Dennis Kennedy judged as the runner-up in best law blog trends, namely, law librarian blogs.

Law librarian blogs "demonstrated once again how the content management skills, professionalism and generosity of librarians translate so well on the Internet" -- Dennis Kennedy

Please email me with comments and suggestions on how to make this blog more useful to you. And please email me if you are interested in contributing to this blog by sending me content to post or by becoming a more regular contributor.

Joe Hodnicki
joe.hodnicki@gmail.com