Italian library blogs: A difficult trend to follow?

This article analyses the results of a survey carried out on 82 Italian library blogs between December 2009 and February 2010. Several aspects were examined: year of creation, status, platform used, technical characteristics (such as internal search engine, chronological archives, blogroll, tags), number of posts and comments, reciprocal links between the blog and the library. Also the responsiveness of the libraries involved was tested. The results show that most of the Italian library blogs examined were created between 2008 and 2009 and are hosted by commercial platforms. Many of them are only sporadically updated, have little identifying data and contextualizing links, and low numbers of posts and users’ comments. Most of them do not have a link to the library website and one third of the blogs and libraries do not offer a digital reference service. The libraries’ response time to the users’ e-mails was quite long: in many cases an answer was given after more than 2 working days and in about one fifth of cases it was not given at all.

► Library blogs are highly growing in Italy.
► Technical characteristics, blog content and libraries’ responsiveness were examined.
► Results show that updating, form and content of the blogs need to be improved.
► Libraries’ response time to users’ e-mails proved to be too long.