Today I was specifically looked for blogging by Japanese studies librarians. I quickly found Shirin Eshghi’s blog at UBC:
Japanese Language Librarian Blog
Information on the Japanese language collection and services at UBC’s Asian Library.
What a great blog! I immediately subscribed to the RSS feed in my Google Reader account. Here’s what caught my eye:
- Monthly listings of selected new books, with a few appealing photos of the books themselves, sometime opened up to interesting pages. The titles (under broad subject categories) I noticed were the kinds of things that people from a wide range of disciplines would find interesting.
- Information about Japanese databases, including tips. For example, Factiva, a general database that includes full text of Japanese newspaper and magazine articles from about 150 Japanese publications, is introduced. I’ve been using Factiva myself to search business news (new publications of Japanese company histories, etc), and have begun promoting it. I like the way Shirin introduces it on her blog.
- There’s a notice about Japanese publishing trends in 2007 — just links to a list of bestsellers and a summary of trends at asahi.com. This kind of timely update is great, though.
- Bravely Shirin links to her online calendar — looks like she will be coming to the AAS/CEAL meetings, so I will be able to talk with her about blogging there!
- There’s a feed from the blog at the bottom of the Japanese Studies Resources web page, which looks very nice. I like that page very much — my old home page was similar. Perhaps I should go back to a simpler presentation of resources. It provides links to more specific resources under subject headings.
Well, those are just my first impressions. There is a lot of “food for thought” for me to consider further here with regard to blogging and presentation of Japanese library resources on a library web site!!
