Some really interesting numbers from Walt Crawford’s book Academic Library Blogs: 231 Examples. His series of detailed metric summaries on the 231 blogs in his book which as far as I know is the only broad objective survey of academic library blogs.
Academic library blogs: Doing the quintiles 1, Posting frequency: In all, the 232 blogs included 6,229 posts, for an average (mean) of 27 posts per blog–about two per week. The median is 14 posts, just over one per week.
Academic library blogs: Total words: The complete set of posts total 852,930 words. The average blog had 3,692 words. The median was 2,244. Comparing that to public library blogs, the average academic blog was about 10% shorter–but the median academic blog was about 17% longer.
Academic library blogs: Average post length: Overall, the average (mean) average length per post is 178 words. The median is 144 words.
Academic library blogs: Illustrations: In the case of illustrations, the blogs in the survey have a fairly freakish pattern: To wit, of 3,662 illustrations used in all 231 blogs over the 92-day study period, more than half (1,975) were in one blog, leaving 1,687 or roughly seven per blog for all the others. The truly meaningless average (mean) is 15.9 illustrations per blog, but the median is all of one illustration.
Some really interesting numbers from Walt Crawford’s book Academic Library Blogs: 231 Examples. His series of detailed metric summaries on the 231 blogs in his book which as far as I know is the only broad objective survey of academic library blogs.
Academic library blogs: Doing the quintiles 1, Posting frequency: In all, the 232 blogs included 6,229 posts, for an average (mean) of 27 posts per blog–about two per week. The median is 14 posts, just over one per week.
Academic library blogs: Total words: The complete set of posts total 852,930 words. The average blog had 3,692 words. The median was 2,244. Comparing that to public library blogs, the average academic blog was about 10% shorter–but the median academic blog was about 17% longer.
Academic library blogs: Average post length: Overall, the average (mean) average length per post is 178 words. The median is 144 words.
Academic library blogs: Illustrations: In the case of illustrations, the blogs in the survey have a fairly freakish pattern: To wit, of 3,662 illustrations used in all 231 blogs over the 92-day study period, more than half (1,975) were in one blog, leaving 1,687 or roughly seven per blog for all the others. The truly meaningless average (mean) is 15.9 illustrations per blog, but the median is all of one illustration.
Academic library blogs: Comments per post: Even more so than total comments per blog, the blogs in Academic Library Blogs: 231 Examples lack extreme cases of high interactivity on a per-post basis: The highest is 2.2 comments per post. The overall average (an average of averages) is all of 0.12 comments per post–basically one comment for every eight posts. The median, of course, is zero.
Academic library blogs: Comments on posts: Overall, there were a total of 575 comments (just less than a third as many as for public library blogs). That’s an average (mean) of 2.5 comments per blog. On the other hand, the median number of comments per blog is precisely the same as for public library blogs: Zero. While 118 of the 252 public library blogs had no comments, 145 of the 231 academic library blogs–nearly 63%–lacked comments entirely.
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