My name is Stephen Francoeur. I'm happy to have been invited to contribute to the new LACUNY Blog and am excited by the conversations and ideas that will be generated by this new venture. For those of you who don't know me, I am an information services librarian at Baruch College. Last spring, I completed my second master's degree at Hunter College (you can read my thesis on the history of McCarthyism and American libraries on my personal wiki) and am now an assistant professor. I have also been a writing for my personal blog, Digital Reference, for the past three years and for the reference blog at Baruch for the past two years.

In addition to writing frequently for blogs, I am an avid reader of them, too. My current Bloglines account has over 300 blog feeds going into it (some of those feeds offer daily postings, others only provide new postings once in a blue moon). You can see a complete list of the blogs I subscribe to here.

During the five years I was working on my second master's degree, I was also working full-time as an instructor here in the library at Baruch and becoming a dad, too. With all the reading I had to do for my master's degree and all the running around at home with a growing boy, I found little time for reading the library periodicals I had previously kept up with (American Libraries, C&RL News, College & Research Libraries, Library Journal, Reference & User Services Quarterly). More than two years ago, I discovered Bloglines, a web-based feed reader where you can view the latest blog posts from whatever blogs you enjoy.

Every day, I go to my Bloglines account on the web to see what new posts have been delivered there. I can scan the headlines for posts and only bother to read a full post when it catches my eye. I have found that this routine of scanning and reading blog posts from my fellow librarians has kept me more up-to-date on what is going on in the library world than my earlier process of journal and magazine reading ever did. (I am happy to note though that I now have time once again to read journals.) And unlike messages posted to listservs, blog posts are easily bookmarked and can easily be re-found via general web search engines or specialized blog search tools.

In future posts to this blog, I hope to recommend a number of my favorite library-related blogs. For now, let me recommend ACRLog, a group blog sponsored by ACRL that features (among others) Steven Bell as a frequent contributor. You may already know Bell from his Keeping Up web site and his Kept-Up Academic Librarian blog.

If you have any questions about how to set up your Bloglines account, feel free to contact me here at Baruch.

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