Top 25 Library Bloggers List the Talk of the Biblioblogosphere

Jennifer Pinkowski -- Library Journal, 9/17/2007

So who are the 25 most popular library bloggers? Online Education Database (OEDb), an Internet resource for online colleges, continuing education, and distance learning, announced its Top 25 libloggers based on visitor traffic and site backlinks. Predicably, the results have stirred contention and criticism. To calculate the rankings, OEDb tallied each site’s Google PageRank, Alexa Rank, Technorati Authority, and Bloglines subscribers. Among other criteria, a blog had to be listed on the DMOZ open-directory page Library and Information Science: Weblogs; written by a librarian, or listed in the top 200 results for a Google search for “librarian blog.” These metrics narrowed the list to 55 blogs. Nearly half made the final cut.

The result was a mixture of familiar faces and lesser-knowns that has many debating its value. Vermont library consultant Jessamyn West, author of top-ranked librarian.net, mused, “To my mind this is mostly saying ‘Jessamyn’s blog has been around the longest,’ which is mostly true.” Waterboro (ME) Public Library’s Molly Williams, who writes the sole library blog on the list (ranked #10), told Library Journal, “I’m pretty surprised we’re on the list but perhaps we have longevity going for us, since the blog as been ongoing for four years now. I’ve never heard of half of the top 25, which surprised me. They must have their audiences.”

Questions, questions

Martini in hand, the anonymous Annoyed Librarian (AL) wrote, “Hey, boys and girls, it turns out that if you limit and massage your data enough, the Annoyed Librarian is the #18 library blog in the whole wide world!”

AL isn’t alone in believing that OEDb’s criteria might have resulted in an inaccurate reflection of who is reading what. The common complaints are that DMOZ is an outdated source; blogs without “library” in the title are often overlooked by the blog search engines; and requirement about where a blog was hosted excluded many that aren’t on library-oriented sites. Yet Google’s Librarian Central made the list at #15, even though it only averaged a little more than a post a week before going on “summer break” June 29. It hasn’t been updated since.

“The result is pretty clear,” Walt Crawford of Walt at Random, #8, told LJ. “They found 55 candidates. I would expect to see at least 400 candidate blogs and possibly more than 800. More significantly, their list omitted many of the blogs that I believe to be most widely read and most influential.” According to Crawford, a senior analyst at OCLC, the author of the self-published Public Library Blogs: 252 Examples, and the man behind Cites and Insights, these include MaisonBisson, Tame the Web, Information Wants to be Free, and Library Stuff.

In essence, bloggers say, the net cast by OEDb was too small. According to a survey conducted by Information Wants to Be Free’s Meredith Farkas, a distance learning librarian at Vermont's Norwich University, there are at least 839 library bloggers -- about 15 times as many as were assessed by OEDb. “I don’t think the measures they use actually indicate much about a blog’s worth,” Farkas said to LJ. “It seems like they thought if they used as many measures as possible, their rankings would be more reliable, never mind if each measure accurately measures anything. What does it mean to come up early on in the results when searching for ‘librarian blog’?”

New survey coming

In response to the rankings, Farkas has created another survey in which she asks library bloggers to submit their own top three favorite blog reads. The survey closes September 29.

Should library bloggers care about OEDb's take? “On one hand, Ellyssa Kroski’s new iLibrarian blog is affiliated with OEDb -- that speaks well of them,” said Crawford. Kroski is a reference librarian at Columbia University’s Butler Library whose blog scored her a book deal; Web 2.0 for Librarians and Information Professionals is slated for publication this fall. “On the other hand,” Crawford continued, “I’d never heard of OEDb before someone pointed out the post to me -- but that’s just me.”

“OEDb isn’t really anything that most libloggers I know regularly read,” West told LJ, “but anyone that comes out with a ‘Top X’ list will generate traffic and interest.”