Mediocre 2.0

While we will highlight particularly moronic academic library blogs, even the more sensible ones can seem less than essential. It’s certainly hard to imagine any scholars actually reading them.

A common approach is to list websites that might help research: for example, this one, and this. Clearly librarians should be experts when it comes to identifying useful sources of online information but we wonder whether randomly listing them on an unstructured, non-searchable blog is of much use to anyone. Better, surely, to draw on this knowledge when dealing with specific enquiries?

We can’t help thinking the motivation for such blogs is less to inform academics (who, presumably, are perfectly capable of finding the information they need) and more to show that librarians are hip to web 2.0.

The danger is that they give the impression that librarians have nothing better to do than idly surf the web for vaguely interesting websites. Writing about the recent KPMG report, Update editor Elspeth Hymans states: "We all need to think lean, and think how what we do adds value. Not 'Do I do what I do well?', but 'Does what I do need to be done at all'?" Quite.