Alexey Skalaban is working as e-resources librarian in the National Library of Belarus, Minsk. He writes a blog for Belarusian Library Association, called “Librarians of Belarus: library weblog”. His blog is the only library related one in Belarus, so in this rather short episode of our LibWorld series he will introduce his own blog.
Libworld Belarus
I write in Russian and sometimes in English. My blog was created on 13th July 2005, and now there are about 2000 posts in it. I write about events in Belarusian library world, conferences, librarians of Belarus, web 2.0, library 2.0, library Toolbars, RFID, library weblogs, e-resources, etc.
Also there are a lot of photos from conferences, and very often I report online from conferences.
Blogging is very popular among librarians and readers of libraries. Every day there are about 400 visitors on my blog. A lot of libraries in Belarus have links to this blog on their web-sites, so Google Page Rank went up to 6.
This is the only one library weblog in Belarus, but I know that a lot of librarians write weblogs, but they are personal and not about libraries.
In my humble opinion library blogging will become more popular in Belarus. Some days ago the Russian State Library started a blog (http://blog.rsl.ru) and our countries (Russia and Belarus) are very similar, so I think that Belarusian libraries will also start blogging.
By the way, National Library of Belarus (NLB) uses some Web 2.0 technologies. I have created a toolbar (http://belarus.mylibrarytoolbar.com/) for patrons and staff of NLB with the help of Conduit.com. I think that this is one more step to use Web 2.0 and start library weblogs.
Of course other libraries also know what blogging is. In winter 2007 there was a seminar (see here and here) where I took part and talked about blogs, RSS, Toolbars, wiki, mash-ups etc.