Resource Roundup: Classics Blogs

Librarians blog, people.  Sometimes I wonder if every librarian under 40 has a blog.  Archaeologists blog a little.  Classical philologists, not so much. So there are relatively few “must-follow” blogs for Classical Studies, in my opinion.  Those few are:

• The Bryn Mawr Classical Review.  Most people aren’t so conscious that this is a blog, as it uses the blog medium to feed content that is just a traditional book review.  I love the BMCR, even if I only skim the reviews, and you should too.
• The Ancient World Online (AWOL) by Charles Ellwood Jones of NYU.  Collects open-access online journals and other publications about the ancient world, with excellent international coverage.  There are occasional mentions of other online projects or issues related to ancient studies.
• Rogueclassicism, by David Meadows.  This is more of a mixture of things – “this day in ancient history”, pull-outs from list-servs announcing conferences and colloquia, references to Classics in pop culture, new archaeological discoveries.  To me it’s the most useful general classics blog.
• Then there’s Atlantides: Feed Aggregators for Ancient Studies, by Tom Elliot of NYU, who as far as I can tell includes the above and pretty much everything else in the realm of ancient world blogging, from Spanish-language archaeologists to vastly different perspectives on cultural heritage preservation to New Testament scholars.  There are multiple feeds available at the link above, rough-sorted by topic.  Subscribe to a feed and you get all the posts from all the blogs on that feed (hence the name “aggregator.”)  Maia Atlantis is the big one; the full list of blogs covered, in alphabetical order, is along the right sidebar.  It’s a bit like drinking from a fire hose to subscribe to the whole thing, but I suggest doing so for a bit, and then subscribing individually to those blogs that interest you and unsubscribing to the feed as a whole.

I’d also like to highlight a couple of blogs I just like.  Blogging (if done well, in my opinion) is kind of personal, and sometimes you like a blogger’s voice and want to follow him or her, despite having little direct interest in his area of study.  Sometimes you GET interested in his area of study!  So here are a few voices I enjoy and find thought-provoking:

• Kostis Kourelis (disclosure: a compatriot at ASCSA in 1998-99 and trench buddy at Corinth!) Objects-Building-Situations.  Kostis looks at everything from trucks on the highway to early 20th century academic culture in Greece with a thoughtful eye.
• William Caraher’s Archaeology of the Mediterranean World.  Not as broad as the title suggests!  A mix of research, teaching, and links.  I loved this post on photographing inventory cards.

A reminder – Bloglines has announced it is going away October 1st, so if you use that as an RSS reader you will need to switch.  I use Google Reader, which is the largest alternative to Bloglines – I switched a while ago, fed up with how often Bloglines was down.  If you hate Google Reader, a librarian blogger I like, Swiss Army Librarian, just did a round-up of RSS readers that are not Google Reader, so you may find one you like.  While twitter and Facebook are discovery tools for new blog content for me, I still rely heavily on an RSS reader to keep up with the things I am devoted to.