One Website, Many Weblogs, and Infinite Wit

Peking University, Oct. 17, 2010: Peking University Library has launched a beta version of PKU Blogs (Beida Bowen), a collection of weblogs written by PKU scholars.

It is an expansion of Collected Works of PKU (Beida Wenku), aiming at providing new services for not only students and faculty, but also online readers off campus, by means of information technology.

All the original blogs assembled are currently open to the public.

That is among a series of measures by PKU Library to facilitate readers by information technology. Recently launched services also include a personal "borrow history" search (2009- ), a booking service of multimedia rooms and facilities, and an auto-service printing.

The new website has many advantages such as a convenient site-search engine, a user-friendly categorization, and preservation of precious web resources and data.

For example, visitors have access to both category- and school/department-based online search in the home page of PKU Blogs, saving the potential time of blindly looking for particular blogs or entries. They could also leave a comment in the "guestbook" column.

PKU Library takes charge of the content construction, platform design and tech support of PKU Blogs. The library carried out research in how PKU teachers are reading and writing blogs, by extensively gathering blog links of teachers, mostly those in the field of humanities and social sciences, analyzing the content of those blogs and keeping track of their updates, before coming up with a fundamental design. The basic structure and technical requirements were established after many discussions among relative staffs of the departments of special collection and systems in the library. Soon the platform of collecting and publishing for PKU Blogs was set up accordingly, with 520 blog entries added, mostly newly updated ones. Earlier contents of those blogs are still being sorted out and will be gradually uploaded.

Up till now, more than 70 PKU scholars' blogs have been collected and incorporated, including professors Chen Pingyuan, Rao Yi, Cao Wenxuan, Kong Qingdong, He Huaihong, Wu Guosheng, Wang Yuechuan, Zhang Yiwu, Yang Kuisong, Luo Zhitian, Zheng Yefu, Lin Yifu, Wang Dingding, and Yao Yang. Many sections are designed so as to cover not only their academic researches, but also their insight into life, comments on current affairs, memories of the past, and so on.

The website also provides at the blog entries a "share" link, through which online readers coud share them in Facebook, Google Bookmarks, Douban, MSN Reporter, MySpace, QQ Bookmarks, Yahoo Buzz, del.ici.ous, Twitter, and Digg.

Translated by: Chen Long

Edited by: Jacques

Source: PKU News (Chinese)