Ut re mi fa sol la si ... blog
Welcome to the Newsletter of ATMLA. It's been awhile since we've produced one of these things, though it wasn't for lack of good intentions. For the first few years of our chapter's nascent existence (we formed from a merger of the Pennsylvania and Chesapeake chapters in 2000), Kile Smith, curator of the Fleisher Collection at the Free Library of Philadelphia, did a masterful job of producing a yearly compendium of our news. But we've had a hard time getting it back off the ground since Kile finished his tenure.
So last fall I suggested to our incoming president Steve Landstreet that we might want to turn the newsletter into a weblog or 'blog'. And like any good leader Steve knew to assign the work to the unfortunate soul who thought up the bright idea in the first place. So here we are several months later. I am now the blog editor and communications committee chair, and the ATMLA Newsletter/Blog is finally a reality.
But why a blog instead of a newsletter? And what's the difference, anyhow? Experts disagree on the definition of a 'blog', but in its simplest form, a blog is a collection of successive entries presented on the web and produced by special software that makes editing and updating a snap. Some blogs are highly personal, allow comments, or trace the connections between a network of otherwise random bloggers. Ours will be centered on the distribution of news from our members and their libraries, will be quickly and easily updated as our news hits the stacks, and will—in most ways—look a lot like a "traditional" online newsletter.
There will be several ways that you the reader can access our blog. First off, one may always visit the chapter website and click on the link for the blog. For those who are a bit tech-savvy, you may subscribe to the blog in a newsreader or aggregator such as Bloglines. And hopefully coming soon, there will be the option to subscribe to periodic e-mail updates.
Stay tuned. And blog on.
--John Anderies, Music Librarian, Haverford College