A few months ago I came across a just developing project of Henry Farrell, Assistant Professor at the Department of Political Science and Elliott School of International Affairs of the George Washington University. He was in the initial stages of developing a rather comprehensive wiki project called The Academic Blog Portal, a directory to the academic blogosphere. The Portal is a disciplinary guide to academic/faculty blogs across the “invisible college“.

The first version of Farrell’s project offered just one librarian blog, and it was included in the “library science” category. After some correspondence with Farrell he agreed that a unique category for academic librarians was needed. The library science category would be designated for blogs by faculty at LIS programs. A new University Librarians category under “Other Parts of the Academy” was created specifically for blogs maintained by college and university librarians.

One constant we all know exists in higher education is that whenever you make any sort of suggestion, most often in a meeting, you just volunteered yourself to take on a new project. Following true academic form, Farrell asked me to edit the university librarians section of the Academic Blog Portal. Not that wikis require much editing, but I’ll do what I can to encourage academic librarian bloggers to add entries for their blogs and to keep the section up to date. So if you are an academic librarian who maintains a blog - it doesn’t need to be a blog that’s about academic libraries or higher education - and you’d like to be included in the Academic Blog Portal - please create an entry for yourself or ask me to provide some assistance if you are new to adding wiki content.

Yesterday I added a couple of blogs I was aware of that I knew were the creations of academic librarians. If your blog is one of them you may wish to create a wikipage (just click on the red-colored link to create the new wikipage - after you’ve registered) to provide more information about your blog or yourself. I hope this will develop into a good listing of blogs by college and university librarians, but even if you’re not a blogging academic librarian check out the Academic Blog Portal. If you have yet to include some selected faculty blogs in your keeping up regimen, now is a good time to do so.