Scholarly Communication Issues

Is the Future of Legal Scholarship in the Blogosphere?

While skimming blogs to find a topic for this post I found a link to Margaret A. Schilt's Is the Future of Legal Scholarship in the Blogosphere? an online post of an article found in the August 31, 2007 edition of "Legal Times". The title was catchy and I decided to read on, despite the lack of "library" in the title. I'm glad I did because Schilt discusses something very pertinent to the modern and future concept of scholarly communication: is blogging actually scholarly?

Schilt first answers this question by defining who the scholarly bloggers actually are--most people think about new and young academics who have grown up in the internet-savvy '90s but in reality most of the scholarly blogs in the legal world are posted by the middle aged tenure professors who have earned their places in the scholarly world via more traditional means. Next, she discusses the worth of the blog as a scholarly tool- should non-tenured academics even blog at all? Schilt points out that blogging has many benefits such as: wide distribution, immediate feedback, immediate scholarly discussion of current events, increased name recognition in your field, as a tool for teaching, and as way to reach the non-academic public. Finally, Schilt discusses how "Blogging contributes to the shortened life cycle of a theory or idea...". Basically, where articles of a 100 pages were not uncommon, shorter articles are becoming more popular or even being demanded by scholarly law journals.

Schilt's examination of the scholarly nature of blogging opened my eyes to how blogs can truly influence an academic community. Anyone interested in this topic would enjoy reading this article found at law.com.

Enjoy!

--posted by Amy Hopkins