Congratulations are due Joe Hodnicki , his team and his contributors.. The USA Law Librarians blog has turned five..
Hodnicki writes
LLB Turns Five Years Old: Another Day, Another Post
http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/law_librarian_blog/2010/01/llb-turns-five-years-old.html
Five years, that’s got to be something like 35 years in blog-years — never thought I would be here today writing this post.
Way Back When. I launched LLB on January 1, 2005 just to add a law librarian blog to the mix of blogs being published by the Law Professor Blogs Network I co-founded in 2004 — never thought either would amount to much at the time. Initially I was blogging solo, then I added co-editors to help out, first Cincinnati Law’s Ron Jones in 2006 and now DePaul Law’s Mark Giangrande (since 2009), plus many great contributing editors over the years. At the time the law librarian/law library blogosphere was relatively uncrowded. Not so anymore. There’s plenty of great blogs regularly publishing now, many by (much) younger professional law librarians full of energy and fresh new ideas. The widespread use of RSS feeds for web destinations, the somewhat late arrival of AALL blogs (compared to what was going on in 2005), and the popularization of other social media forms of communication have made it much easier for law librarians to stay informed and to share their opinions about professional developments. Some of the earlier law librarian/law library blogs have gone silent or publish far less frequently than they once did. That’s understandable. Blogging is no longer the Next Big Thing. It’s now a relatively mature form of web communication with many alternative social networking formats offering excellent options.
We keep plugging away on LLB but god knows for how much longer — perhaps five years is more like 70 in blog-years. It can feel like that sometimes, particularly last year when I went through the hell that was a 5-month spell of cluster headaches because my doctor in her infinite wisdom decided my meds had to be changed. Blogging on lithium — the same drug used to put asylum inmates in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest into a zombie state — was “a trip.” At least electro-shock therapy wasn’t involved. If it was up to my long-suffering blog widow, Lynette, I would have stopped a year or two ago. I’m surprised she hasn’t tried to perform a lobotomy while I’m asleep. Maybe she has. Maybe it has been successful! If you were a zoombie, would you know it?
Blogging can be a grind, but when it is, it’s a grind of my own making because I believe the blogging platform is best suited for regular posting, not occasional publications nor micro-bursts into the ether. When the ABA Journal was soliciting blog recommendations for its top law blogs last year, it called for blogs that published at least three times a week. By implication, the ABA Journal was recognizing what was appropriate for this form of web communications. LLB has never missed a day in five years. That doesn’t mean every day’s RSS feed contains must-reads; clearly that’s not the case. They’re just blog posts, nothing more, nothing less, and in my case they are oftentimes the result of an early morning caffeinated rush to see what’s been going on before I head off to the “day job.” We, or at least I, make no attempt to be the first to publish something. Oftentimes, what’s really interesting is others’ responses to breaking developments so I tend to hold off rushing to publish something so I can read and link to both the development at the moment and others’ opinions on the matter. LLB is not necessarily breaking the news but does try to add some context to it.
Times Have Changed. One thing has changed over the years. In the early days, LLB focused on news and developments as a current awareness service of sorts for law librarians and others. We did little in the way of analysis and commentary. Now that the landscape of web communications has changed, we certainly have gotten more opinionated. Looking back over last year’s posts, the library-vendor relationship, the anti-competitive effects of the legal publishing industry and its consequences on financing the provision of legal information resources in the current economic climate, the search for alternatives now and the very likely transformation of legal publishing in the not too distant future have been themes that stands out on LLB and in the law librarian blogosphere generally. I’ve added my 2-cents but I doubt it has been worth even that much.
