In the Hugo and Nebula award winning classic science fiction novel Ender's Game (1985), Orson Scott Card writes about genius children manipulated by adults in order to defeat a threatening race of aliens. Two of the main characters of this novel, also children, manage to have a profound effect on world politics and events by posting articles and essays to the "nets" under the pseudonyms of "Demosthenes" and "Locke." In the novel they change the course of history through these efforts.

When I first read this novel the idea of someone having that kind of influence on the world by simply posting an essay to the "nets" was, at best, far fetched. The WWW was in its infancy, and USENET simply wasn't read by enough people to have that sort of an impact. If Card were to write his novel today, however, the "nets" would be replaced by a much more plausible tool, one that is reaching a critical mass in popularity today, especially in academia. This tool is, of course, the weblog.

What is a blog?

According to Donna Wentworth, Web Publications Editor at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, a weblog or blog is:

"… a website updated frequently with links, commentary and anything else you like. New items go on top and older items flow down the page. Blogs can be political journals, news digests, and/or personal diaries; they can focus on one narrow subject or range across a universe of topics. The weblog form is unique to the Web, highly addictive, and may be changing how we communicate with one another." (http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/about/)

Dave Winer of ScriptingNews.com gives blogs a four part definition. A blog is a personal tool whereby the reader can gain an understanding of the weblog author's personality, style, and opinions. A blog is also on the web where it is cheaper to publish, and can be updated frequently. A blog is published through templates through which the process is automated and relatively easy to perform. Finally a blog is usually a part of a community. Mr Winer writes "no weblog stands alone, they are relative to each other and to the world (http://newhome.weblogs.com/personalWebPublishingCommunities)."

This idea of "community" in weblogs is easy to see by visiting some of the more popular blogging sites on the web including blogspot.com, weblogs.com, or, more close to home, http://babelogue.citypages.com:8080/ from the City Pages. Through these sites anyone can sign up, create their own blog site, and begin writing about anything they want. These sites also feature tools whereby the reader can see what the most popular posts for the day are, or see what kinds of discussions are dominating people's minds at a given time. All of these personal sites feed off of each other by linking to each other and building communities of specific strains of thinking and ideas. There are so many blogs out there (some estimates are at over 100,000 ) MIT has begun research into gleaning out what kinds of issues matter most to the blogging world at any particular time (http://blogdex.media.mit.edu/). Through Blogdex, and other tools like it, a reader can see what links are getting referred to the most on blogs around the world.

Impact of blogs

Blogs are having a huge impact on the political landscape of America. According to Hugh Hewitt of the Daily Standard, Trent Lott is no longer the majority leader of the Senate because, in part, blogs "filed and fueled the story of his remarks at Strom's birthday bash." Hewitt also comments that the New York Times is reeling due to the consistent attention to inaccurate journalism documented by blogs. The upcoming presidential election will almost certainly be impacted by blogs, Hewitt writes, especially by the "Big Four" of the blogging community: Andrew Sullivan (http://andrewsullivan.com/), Mickey Kaus (http://kausfiles.com/), Instapundit.com, and the Volokh Conspiracy (http://volokh.com/). According to Hewitt, if any of these four pick up on a news story or write a popular opinion, look for the news media in general to start getting in tune with these opinions, lest the public start tuning in to other channels (http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/002/763qkecv.asp). Obviously this will make for a unique election. What makes this even more unique, though, is the personas behind the last two of these Big Four. Instapundit.com is maintained by a law professor at the University of Tennessee named Glenn Reynolds, and the Volokh Conspiracy is maintained by Eugene Volokh, a law professor at UCLA.

Blogging and Academia

Thanks to blogs, academia is having a bigger influence on public discourse than ever before. In a recent issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, David Glenn writes about "scholars who blog" and he gives some of the pros and cons of this new medium. The advantages by far outweigh the negatives. Blogs offer faculty, staff, and students a freedom of tone impossible in scholarly journals or even the student newspaper. Blogs offer an immediacy of publishing unheard of in academia, as well as an easy, and sometimes, fun way to do it. Blogs also put faculty, students, and staff at an even playing field; essentially your opinions are judged on the merits of your writing and arguments, not your standing in your academic field. Blogs offer a way to rapidly discuss opinions, issues, and ideas, and allow people from across the country, and campus, to connect with each other. Blogs are also lowering the cost of publishing while at the same time raising public awareness concerning academic issues (http://chronicle.com/free/v49/i39/39a01401.htm). Institutions will soon be forced to look at this new medium as more than just a fad.

One institution that has already begun looking at blogs more seriously is Harvard University (http://blogs.law.harvard.edu). Harvard's Law School and Berkman Center for Internet and Society began hosting campus blogs in February 2003. Anyone with a campus id and password can create a blog and join their community. As of yet, there are no rules to what you can publish [UPDATE 7/10/2003: Terms are now up under http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/terms]. There are currently 100 blogs offered through the site, and Harvard has begun aggregating them and ranking them in terms of popularity. Obviously, the research potential of this new medium is quite apparent. (Note: The University of California - Berkeley is also hosting blogs, but not as publicly - http://iu.berkeley.edu/iu/ - it is very difficult to find the blogs they host. Berkeley also offers a course in blogging culture).

Blogging and the U of M

Discussions about blogging have begun at the U of M. Laura Gurak of the Internet Studies Center has released a call for papers for a future online collection of essays entitled "Into the Blogosphere: Rhetoric, Community, and Culture of Weblogs." According to the post (http://www.idblog.org/archives/000199.html#comments) these essays will be edited by the "University of Minnesota Blog Collective." As far as I can tell, this is the only mention of the "blog collective" so far. Many students and faculty from the U of M also have their own blogs, but as of yet there is nothing that has brought this group of Gophers together into a community ala blogs.law.harvard.edu or even http://www.hoosierreview.com/iublogs.html (a list of IU blogs). The Minnesota Daily has also written two articles on blogs within the last year: "The Art of Blogging" (http://www.mndaily.com/articles/2003/03/28/5375) and "Blogging communities' popularity draws students" (http://www.mndaily.com/articles/2003/03/26/5330).

One of my favorite blogs is Aaron's Baseball Blog (http://baseballblog.blogspot.com/). Aaron Gleeman is an undergraduate at the U of M studying journalism. He writes about baseball, and the Minnesota Twins, and his posts are read by literally thousands of people every month. In fact some nationally prominent sports writers (such as Jayson Stark of espn.com) have begun quoting him in some of their articles. This is all well and good, and it has certainly given Mr. Gleeman a leg up on his job hunt and potential once he graduates, but what I like most about his blog is when he talks about the University of Minnesota. Every once in a while Mr. Gleeman will write about his professors, his classes, his conversations with classmates. He has yet to write about the libraries, but I'm sure he will. Reading his posts about the U of M got me to thinking that he can't be alone. There are probably a lot of students, faculty, and staff at the U that have opinions about this fine institution and more, but as of yet they have no place to put them.

Blogging and the University Libraries

There are many, many library related blogs (http://www.lisfeeds.com/) and they are discussing blogs in a big way. Most of the posts that I have seen relate to how to archive blogs or catalog them. However, one blogging librarian in particular named Jessamyn West has started an interesting discussion on blogs and how they are currently affecting libraries (http://www.librarian.net/collab.html). She argues that blogs are turning into a very important way people find out about information, joining other popular sites like Amazon.com, Google, and even Ebay. Ms. West contends that thanks to the popularity of the Internet, and these new tools, to many people libraries are now more about finding facts and known items than about finding out about opinions or timely information. We have certainly seen this in how our own patrons use Amazon first to find out about books, and then check MNCAT to see if we have the item. Ms. West seems to argue that blogs are going to strain the relationship between libraries and fresh opinion even further unless libraries start looking seriously at how we can leverage this new medium. Furthermore, Ms. West argues that librarians' traditional role of directing people towards information is being replaced by librarians as archivists or preservationists only. The Internet, Google, Amazon, and now blogs have all added to this strain. In fact, I didn't use one library database to write this white paper. I used the search mechanisms of different blogs to find pertinent articles and web sites.

Some people may dismiss this as nothing more than doom and gloom, but it is certainly food for thought. Ms. West's presentation received a lot of discussion, the most compelling of which I found on another library weblog called rawbrick.net (http://www.rawbrick.net/2003_04.html). The author of this blog (an anonymous author) argues that:

"I think at least for academic institutions, there's a sense of scholastic legitimacy that is leant by the library and the breadth and depth of its holdings - already playing an important role in the area of scholarly communications. And the library, in turn, can lend that reputation to [blogs], by hosting them, by hosting the microcontent that feeds them, by playing the platform role for this new form of scholarly discourse. Departments who might otherwise be disinclined to participate, might become otherwise convinced, given the opportunity for institutional recognition or validation ..."

I think the University Libraries should begin hosting weblogs for the U of M community. The idea has already been suggested through the proposal of the Undergraduate Initiatives Council, but in many ways it is bigger than just undergraduates. As a library, we are already discussing ways that we can change the scholarly publishing paradigm, ways that we can create communities of interest, and ways that we can create a digital repository of scholarly output. Hosting blogs would give us an opportunity to investigate how this new medium can help us accomplish, or touch upon, all three of these goals. Hosting weblogs would give faculty, staff, and students a way to express their opinions on any topic quickly and easily, and allow faculty, staff, and students a unique way to interact with each other concerning courses and assignments. Through blogs, professors can interact with their students (both past and present) in ways that WebCT, or other learning management systems, cannot. Hosting blogs would help the libraries investigate the connections between blogging and the traditional academic enterprise, and enable us to further the libraries' role in this enterprise.

Hosting blogs would also make the University Libraries the center point for intellectual discussion on campus. Using Harvard as a model, we could build a server for as little as $5,000 that would allow any U of M affiliated person the opportunity to publish essays and articles about topics that interest them. Thousands of people would come to our site every day not just to look up a book, or find a full text article, but also to discuss important topics, read what other people are currently discussing, and possibly post their own opinions. Having this tool in the libraries would give us the opportunity to research this important new medium from archiving and cataloging to aggregating and disseminating. Most importantly, hosting blogs would leverage the libraries' traditional role as a defender of intellectual freedom, and indirectly help our faculty, staff, and students participate in our democratic society (can you hear the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" playing in the background?).

The Libraries are the obvious place to host this new medium. According to statistics generated by our own servers and the University's DNS servers, the UL website is one of the most used sites on campus, if not the most used website on campus. The University Libraries is already a leader in promoting the free flow of information on campus; allowing access to blogs and encouraging blogging from our faculty, staff, and students is a natural extension of this role. It could be a big part of the upcoming LUMINA redesign, and it would definitely change people's opinions about the University Libraries.

I welcome your feedback.