The Central European country Slovakia emanated from the division of the Czechoslovakia in 1992/93.
After the end of Communist rule in the nineties of the 20th century the library system in Slovakia transformed “from a severely hierarchic and idealogically unilateral constructed system to an open and integrated system of public services for the information society” [1] Kimlicka, Stefan: Das Bibliothekswesen in der Slowakei nach 1990. In: Bibliothek. Forschung und Praxis 28 (2004) H. 2, S. 204 – 209
. In the year 2000 a new Library Act was adopted. It provided legal framework and principles for the functioning of the Library Network in Slovakia.
Slovakia became a member of the European Union in May 2004.
More Information about the Slovak librarianship you can glean in the speech from Dusan Katuscak, the general director of the Slovak National Library.
My own BlogStory by Jana Jelinkova
It was one nice cloudy winter day when the idea came into my head, that it will be fine to have my own blog. In a matter of fact – several people tucked on me to blogging, because they blogged for one or many years. Many of them have own podcast, and many other “Web 2.0” mysterious things. Like a skilled reader and writer into discussion, I created my first own blog. I was quickly surprised, because blog was popular and I have many comments of my first posts and it was created some group of readers, which have similar opinions of life like me and so on. But that was an absolutely anonymous blog, but my good experiences made me sure, that I can have an official blog – so I have one now – with my name, photo and my “life’s philosophy”.
Note: I post it (my blogstory) in www.library20.ning.com 🙂
Slovak Librarian Blogosphere
Since 2005 the following librarian blog exists: http://vyhladavanie.blogspot.com (Searching on the Internet), it is the blog of Mirka Gresková.
Another interesting blog: http://scitech-infozdroje.blogspot.com (SciTech info-sources) by Alena Paulikova.
More examples:
Blog of Slovak Librarians Association – District of Bratislava: http://sskba.blogspot.com
Blog about digitize: http://digitalizacia.blogspot.com
Blog of University Library in Bratislava: http://univerzitna.kniznica.info/drupal/sk/blog
Lilibrarian’s Scratchings: http://catka1.blogspot.com/
FunBlog for librarians: http://freewebs.com/funlibrarian
As reasons for blogging Slovak librarians argue for example:
„Blog is made by simple registration“
„Changes of content and look of page are simple“
„Simple publishing – here and now“
„I don‘t need skills in something like HTML, XML and so on“
„I create content directly on the server of the blog“
„I can make the blog available only for several people, or I can make it available for everybody“
„I don‘t waste my time with an installation of complicated software“
„Update and correction are possible whenever and from anywhere internet access exists“
…
A comparison between most popular blogs in Slovakia showed that the blog “Searching on the internet” of Mirka Gresková has most of the postings of all blogs (see the graph below).
An inquiry about of blogposts on webpages of newspapers SME and PRAVDA showed the following results:
What I expect from the future of library and library blogs in my country?
Perhaps it will be better – but it is possible, that better means many blogs not better quality of posts on blogs.