A glance to Iranian librarianship blogs: a survey using webometrics method

By the end of mid 1990 and the early of twentieth century, web 1.0 has pulled users to information; in contrast, using new structures, the creation of web 2.0 started pushing information to users. It was taken placed by marriage of content and technology. Electronic encyclopedias such as wiki, photo sharing such as Flikr, social networks, blogs and so forth can be called as their babies. Blog or weblog is one of web 2.0 attractive components which let information societies demonstrate and exchange thoughts and information easily in a flash. Library Weblogs can be created by librarians, library science faculties and students in any of related issues which enable the librarianship society to access updated information as a duck soup. Some may wonder if blogging in the library is a responsible thing to do however, blogging does offer an alternative and superior way to communicate with the patrons. Since 2002, when weblog has been introduced to Iranian librarianship for the first time, it has been well matured amongst Iranian librarianship and flourished in 2005 and 2006, entirely. The current research is about activities of Iranian librarianship weblogs and study them using webometrics methods. AltaVista search engine has been used for this research within April 2006.The results demonstrate that only 28 weblogs are active out of 46 Iranian librarianship blogs which are updating day in and day out. This study also indicates that there are only three cooperated weblogs and almost all of them use Iranian hosts, mostly Blogfa. There is only one weblog which is hosted by Blogsky. The language assessment of the survey shows 25 Persian (Farsi) weblogs, two English weblog and only one bilingual (English and Persian) among those 28 active blogs. The survey ranks aforementioned weblogs using total links, self-link, inlinks and web impact factor5 (WIF). Writing in Persian, limiting to Iran library science society, informing local information focused on Iranian librarianship and general library sciences issues; The Iranian librarians' weblogs could neither find extended links so do exchanged links and the link exchanging is mostly limited to library weblogs in Persian.