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A publication of our own "The concept is simple enough. Create a Web page. Update it regularly with brief personal reflections or witty commentary, sprinkled with links to other pages. Put new entries at the top of the page, pushing older ones down. Voilą, you've got yourself a Web log." Each class member will contribute entries to the class weblog, or blog. Although weblogs take many forms, as will be demonstrated in class, ours will follow the example of many of its contemporaries by serving as a filter for the massive amount of information available on the topics we'll be studying. This filter functions as each student-author posts links to high-quality, relevant, web-based information; adds explanation or commentary to these links; and makes general observations about our topics. One important difference between weblogs and standard webpages is the ability to publish and update them without any kind of web-publishing software, HTML coding knowledge , or FTP software. Our blog will use the best known weblog-publishing tool, Blogger. The ease of this process will be demonstrated in class. Each student-author should post a minimum of one and a maximum of three entries to the blog each week. Of those, a minimum of one and a maximum of two should include links to webpages you've discovered that you believe will be useful and important to your classmates. Any additional entries may contain simply personal observations and ideas. I'll also post class announcements there, so everyone should check it regularly. We'll count "weeks" as calendar weeks, Sunday through Saturday. The idea of the min-max and the weekly schedule is to keep information flowing, but also to keep the level of that flow manageable for us to keep up with, given our class size.
Posted links and observations don't need to pertain to that week's class topics, but they should be relevant to the course in general. To stimulate your finding of such links, each student will monitor one already existing weblog, but postings do not need to come from that source, either. At some point during the course, one of your postings should be about your monitored weblog itself, along with a paragraph or so of explanation and opinion about it. Below is a list of some current library-related weblogs that could be chosen to monitor. If you'd like, look them over and email me your first and second choices. Students may also choose another weblog to monitor that's not on the list, as long as it relates in some way to the course. If you don't express a preference by Th.06.07, I'll assign you one. Generally, we'll limit each weblog to one assigned student, but for some of the more prolific blogs, two students who express a preference may be assigned. |
Current library-related weblogs |
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Gin, and Search and Retrieval (Librarian Avengers) |
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and, for any German speakers, Netbib |
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Or see a more comprehensive list at LibDex: The Library Index |
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Non-library, information technology weblogs (highly recommended by our friends at NewBreed Librarian) |
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