The History Librarian

I subscribe to a bunch of RSS feeds from Project MUSE in order to keep up with both history and library scholarship (and to see what’s going on in other areas of interest) and happened to notice a trend with the feeds to which I subscribe - the library-related feeds have way more subscribers in Bloglines than the history-related feeds.  A few examples:

• Libraries and the Cultural Record - 15 subscribers
• Library Trends - 23 subscribers
•  portal: libraries and the academy - 43 subscribers
• Reviews in American History - 6 subscribers
• Journal of World History - 1 subscriber
• Eighteenth-Century Studies - 4 subscribers
• Past & Present - 4 subscribers

That’s a pretty major difference.  One might even see it as a trend.  Obviously, this does not approach any sort of thorough empirical study, but it certainly seems like librarians are way more up on (and interested in) RSS feeds than the scholarly faculty whom we serve.