Exploring connections of the biblioblogosphere

S. Craig Finlay, Michael Johnson, Vincent Malic, Carolyn Hank, Xiaozhong Liu, Chaoqun Ni, Cassidy R. Sugimoto
2011 Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology  
The neologism, the biblioblogsphere, has emerged in recent years to describe the institutional publication of blogs of libraries and the personal, typically professionally-oriented publication of blogs by librarians. Much literature on this trend has been anecdotal in nature, though a growing body of research literature has emerged in the past several years. This paper contributes to the latter development, reporting the findings from an exploratory study mapping connectivity in the
more » ... phere, the first part of a planned, extended research study on scholarly communication in the biblioblogosphere. Patterns of interlinking within a sample of 1,606 library blogs were studied. The outgoing links of posts published to these blogs over one year were compared with the URLs of all blogs in the sample.. It was found that the majority of the sampled blogs (80%) did not link to any other blog within the sample. Interlinked blogs (20%) tended to cluster according to library type, blog subject or geographical proximity. Approximately 1/3 of these were located within a single massive network consisting of 125 "nodes," or blogs, while the rest were in dyads and triads, representing networks comprised of two or three blogs, respectively. Findings suggest that the biblioblogosphere conforms to the locally dense, globally sparse structure of blog networks established by previous studies. Personal blogs ) are more likely to be located within a network than institutional blogs. These findings suggest that individual bloggers are actively shaping the networked, hyper-linked structure of the library blogosphere, while institutional blogs having less overall impact.
doi:10.1002/meet.2011.14504801331 fatcat:bvrfwjrl3fb6zozs5wibmhhx5m