Blogs have significant potential for enhancing scholarly communications. The ease-of-use of blogging software allows researchers direct access to publishing on the Internet. Researchers can now publish electronically much more easily than ever before. But, faculty and researchers still need guidance in getting started, just like any businessperson does when starting a successful blog. We are still at the early stages in academia of developing support structure for faculty who want to utilize blogs for research publications.

Few universities have yet developed systematic services for blogs, so researchers are going elsewhere. James Farmer, a blog consultant at BLOGSAVVY, writes about his experiences in aiding a researcher to setup a blog that will have the functionality of an electronic journal. That’s an excellent function for a blog.

Indeed, a few years ago when I worked with a professor to create Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal I looked in vain for good software that would support publishing of an e-journal. But, blog software offers very good tools for content management. Hmmm, perhaps a good project would be to develop a WordPress plugin designed for supporting electronic journals. Hey, anyone interested in working with me on that?

As a librarian I’m also concerned about the long-term preservation of scholarship disseminated through blogs. While I’m not advocating that all faculty blogs must go through a centralized system maintained by a university, preservation of scholarly blogs is an important issue for future research. The web already provides some tools but these need to be fine-tuned for the specific focus of scholarly communications. Syndication feeds offer a tremendous opportunity here. I’ll go into that topic in a later posting.