At least that’s what I thought after reading over Walt Crawford’s investigation of the “biblioblogosphere” in the September Cites & Insights (pdf link). I knew there were a lot of library weblogs–I subscribe to close to thirty in my RSS reader–but Crawford analyzed over 230 library-related blogs, and ran down sixty of the blogs with the widest reach (according to his interpretation of his data; if you’d like to interpret it yourself, he’s made it available as an Excel spreadsheet). The likelihood of my adding something entirely new to that mix seems low.

And yet, here we are.

This is the first real post to my new library weblog, See Also. While I am obviously feeling a little self-conscious about adding my blog to those 230+ that are already out there, I’m also very excited about the idea of thinking, writing, and conversing about libraries, librarianship, and more.

I have had other blogs in the past, but most of those were just my outboard brain, a parking place for URLs I didn’t want to lose (now I just use del.icio.us). I made no attempt to build a readership, to communicate, to connect.

But over the last year as I read more and more library weblogs as they hashed out Gormangate and tried to understand the implications of tags and folksonomies, I wanted to become part of the conversation. I left the occasional comment, but it seemed like I needed a home base if I was really going to take part. See Also is intended to be that base.

So the next few posts will probably also be navel-gazers like this one. Then I want to write up a few things I have been working on this summer (or longer). After that, though, I hope to take a wider perspective, and write about academic libraries and librarianship, libraries and technology, and similar topics.

So the next time Crawford does his investigation, I hope that See Also will be right up there, and that I can thank my many (I’ll settle for several) loyal readers for making See Also such a success.