Here is the Survey of the Biblioblogosphere, as promised. If you write a library blog (personal, professional, official, unofficial, part of a community, in any language) please visit the survey and represent! I really want to learn more about who is blogging, and I’m way too lazy to go through every blog like Walt did. And a survey will result in different statistics; some that one would not be able to glean from looking at a person’s blog. I have a number of demographic questions about bloggers (age, where they live, where they work, how long they’ve been in the field, at what age they got their MLS, etc.), about their blogs (when they got started, what type of blog it is, what software they use, etc.), and about their attitudes towards change and their workplace. I plan to publish the statistics on my blog as soon as the reponses stop coming in.
Those who commented on my post the other day brought up some very good questions that I should ask in the survey I was creating. Dave Hook was interested in knowing the number of people who “read library blogs vs the number of people who write library blogs”. This is a statistic I’m geniunely interested in knowing as it demonstrates the true impact of the biblioblogosphere, but it’s one that I can’t really cover in a survey of bloggers. I’m only looking at those who write blogs and it would be much more difficult to collect data on those who read blogs. Laura Crossett wanted to know about linking behaviors, and I think it would be really great to know how often and why people link to other sources. However, I didn’t want this survey to be too long, so I hope someone else will come up with a survey that investigates linking behavior. Joy wanted to know what library school people went to, but it wasn’t really practical to list all of the library schools and I certainly didn’t want to make the survey just about the U.S. Her suggestion gave me the good idea to find out what part of the U.S., Canada, or the world librarians are blogging from. It might be interesting to see what countries or regions have strong concentration of library bloggers. I know I’ve seen a good number of library blogs from Brazil, so I’m hoping that people from all over the world take part in this survey. Alane had a brilliant idea about getting some sense of people’s openness to change, and I created two questions that I hope will get to the heart of people’s attitudes about innovation, technology, and their places of work. It’s pretty difficult to gauge such things in two questions.
So let’s get to it! The more of you who participate, the more accurately the results will paint a picture of the biblioblogophere.
I tried, but the survey directly discriminates against “library people” who neither have nor have any intention of getting a library degree; you can’t get past the first page. It’s your survey, that’s your privilege. By my definition of “library people” you’ll be undercounting over-50 bloggers by at least one. But then, other questions are nearly impossible to answer if you don’t actually work in a library, so…
We all define the sphere of inquiry differently. You’ve drawn a circle that explicitly leaves me out. Again, your privilege: It’s your survey.
I just took your survey, Meredith, and I have to agree with Walt that there is some definite bias – not only towards those who don’t work in libraries, but those of us who are essentially solo librarians in our libraries. Questions about administrators are difficult to answer for me because my “administrator” is across an ocean and five time zones away. The list of potential job titles was extensive, but seemed to mostly encompass positions in public and academic libraries.
I’m aware the great majority of librarians do work in public and academic libraries, but at the same time, there’s an entire professional association devoted to those of us who don’t.
I look forward to seeing the results of your survey. I’m sure the information you gather will be very interesting.
Sorry about that, Walt and Amanda. It’s the first time I’ve designed a survey like this, so I guess I was bound to make some mistakes. That’s why I put the “other” section where people could describe their job title or the blog software they use or other things if I didn’t mention it. And there are several people who don’t have degrees who have already answered the survey and wrote that they are “library staff with six years experience”. I knew I would probably screw things up in one way or another, but I figured that putting the “other” option would allow me to compile all of the answers later on. And most of the questions do not require the user to answer, so if one question does not apply to you, you don’t have to answer it.
I hadn’t realized that I’d made the question about the age when one received their MLS required. That was a mistake. I switched it to optional and I hope you’ll reconsider filling out the survey, Walt, since I don’t think there is anything else in the survey that would require that you work in a library to be able to answer. Clearly, you are a librarian no matter where you work and no matter what degree you have, so I think all of the non-MLS-related questions shouldn’t be a big problem to answer.
I worked in a library as a “paraprofessional”, and I always hated the artificial walls put up between “librarians” (with MLS) and “paraprofessionals” (without MLS). I honestly think that someone who has been working in a library for 6 or 10 or 30 years and is doing the job of a librarian should be allowed to call themselves a librarian (especially since most people don’t seen to learn all that much when they go to library school anyways).
OK, I’ll give it a try. Yes, it was question7 that stopped me cold.
But I’m not a librarian, at least not a professional librarian–and I haven’t worked in a library for the last 26 years (although I did for 17 years before moving to RLG). I’m a “library person…” [Note that most analysts and many programmer/analysts at RLG *are* professional librarians; I’m an oddity.]
I think you did a pretty good job with the survey to begin with, especially if its your first one. I got some experience with survey-creating in library school myself, and its impossible to make it perfect. I did utilize the space to describe my possition – I actually had to shorten my response because I ran out of room.
As for the administrator question, my situation is fairly unique even among special librarians. There aren’t many that work alone and yet have an administrator.
I took the survey–and I’ve joined the other bloggers pointing people to the survey. My apologies for the snarky tone of my first comment. Good luck with the survey; I look forward to seeing the results. Even if I still don’t think I live in the Southwest…
Why did you leave school libraries off the survey? You got quite specific about academic libraries, but school libraries were no where. There are quite a number of us, you know…
Like I said earlier, I knew that my list was not exhaustive nor all inclusive. That’s why I put the “other column”, so that anyone with another position that I didn’t mention could write it in there. And that’s what people have been doing, including at least two school librarians. Are there a lot of school librarian bloggers? I’ve only seen one or two, and I’d be very interested in reading others if you’d like to send me the links.
Fun survey, though I would have dispensed with the regions and given folks states to select.
Neat survey.
One comment: you need to define the size of cities you expect. “Large Urban Area” for Canada is “Small Urban Area” for USA. Even within Canada, what is Large vs. Small will be matter of opinion.
Richard, I guess I wasn’t really thinking about size as much as about the sort of things one would find in large urban areas versus small rural areas (such the sort of educational institutions, cultural institutions, technology infrastructure, libraries, etc.). In rural Vermont, we don’t have any big Universities, but in most big cities (whether Montreal or Chicago) there are plenty of good-sized academic institutions. I just wanted to see if having all of these things at one’s fingertips makes a person more inclined to blog. But maybe that’s impossible to gauge in my survey, because obviously there will be more librarians in places with larger population densities than in rural areas. This isn’t a study I’d publish in a peer-reviewed journal — it’s just to satisfy my own curiosity and maybe the curiosity of others too.
I’m fairly sure a large urban area in Canada is exactly the same as a large urban area in the US. I mean, is 6 million fewer in the US than it is in Canada, or what?
Maybe he’s thinking that Canadian urban areas report their populations using metric numbers.
As far as regional distribution goes, a far bigger debate is what constitutes Central Canada vs Eastern Canada, since we here in Canuckistan can’t even agree on that one. But I think that we’re really really over-analyzing things here.
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