Legal Research

NYPL and Blogs

By Simon Fodden

First the newsy bit: The New York Public Library has a blog. This isn’t law, but it is libraria (is there such a word? there should be), which is a lot of what Slaw is about. And even more, it’s simply interesting. It’s a multi-author blog, so at the moment there’s stuff, for example, on an animated Bayeux Tapestry, on Aubrey Beardsley (who was something of an animated tapestry himself, come to think of it, and English 17th century hand-pressed propaganda.

Then the terminology bit. At the top of the blog page is the word “Blogs.” Now a lot of people get the jargon of blogging wrong, referring to individual posts or entries as “blogs,” perhaps not making the connection between blog and weblog and the antecedent “log” itself, which has always had “entries.” So I was puzzled by the plural title here: unlike the NYPL to get it wrong.

Turns out that this blog is an amalgam of perhaps a dozen individual blogs that have been running for a few months now. The navigation, however, doesn’t let you discover who all the bloggers are; nor does it let you easily learn about each blogger’s focus. Best, I think, if they just gave the aggregate a name and let it go at that, as we do here at Slaw.

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on February 24, 2008 (boomark / email).