We have a moving images archivist in our family who has been maintaining a site, and later a blog, on television history for ten years. Recently we were discussing the amount of content that people like ourselves can generate on-line over a decade.
Archivist Gauthier pointed out that unless someone does an Internet search on a specific subject that we wrote about back in, say, 2007, our perfectly good material is going to be pretty much buried under all the copy we've written in the intervening years. To deal with that issue, he's planning to dip into his vault on a regular basis in order to expose his present readers to work they wouldn't otherwise know about.
When he told me his plan, I looked at him and said, "Why, that must be why Liz B. is republishing older reviews." She's pointing new readers to material they never saw and reminding long-time readers about older books. (Bless her.)
Just a couple of months ago, I set up a link in my side bar so that readers can access the Connecticut Children's Literature Calendar at any time. No hunting for it. After the little professional gabfest with my family member, I've added two more links. Look over to your left, and you'll see that you can also pull up all the Time Management Tuesday and The Weekend Writer posts. That doesn't take you way back into OC's past (the Time Management Tuesday series goes back the farthest, and that's only a year and a half), but it is a beginning attempt to make some of that original content more available.
A lot of times when a new book comes out by an author that I previously reviewed (or it goes on super-sale), I will "re-post" about it for these same reasons. It reminds my long time readers about it and a lot of times they will buy the book because they had too much going on before and forgot or didn't have time. It also exposes new followers to older reviews they may have missed out on.
ReplyDeleteI don't actually re-post in those situations, but I'll often link to the older post.
ReplyDeleteWith a lot of litblogs there is such a desire to keep up with and be part of "the next big thing." Then the next big thing is forgotten about while everyone is pursuing the next next big thing. This is probably encouraged by blog tours and publishers/writers approaching bloggers to provide coverage of next fall's releases.
I think this interest in remembering what books and authors bloggers were writing about in the past is a great thing. Those books that were covered in 2006 haven't changed, after all.