After more than a year, there has been a bit of activity at the Google Librarian Central site, though not what was hoped for when I heard that they were preparing an update.
What they announced in a post titled “Endless Summer” was that they were closing down the Librarian Central Blog and communicating via their newsletter. Comments and suggestions will be handled by a web form submission.
Ouch! Double-Ouch!! This is better than the dead silence of the past year, but just barely. We have been moved back in time, relegated to Web 1.0.
They could have kept the blog alive by posting the individual newsletter items one-by-one. They could have used the blog for items posted or discussed elsewhere, but posted there because of their interest to libraries. They could have opened things up a bit and asked for volunteers to coordinate topics and ideas for better incorporating Google into libraries. Any of these would have been about the same amount of work, and would have preserved or improved the dynamic and social aspects of the site. They backed away instead.
We are left to wonder why.
