Stewart Baker, a librarian at California State University, is conducting a survey of librarians and library science students to study the impact of library blogs vs scholarly journals. If you would like to take the survey follow this link: Blogs vs Journals Survey.
I personally think he is trying to answer a really interesting question, if both blogs and scholarly journals have value in the library world and more specifically what value? If money and time are both in short supply, can we just read blogs? Are blogs accurate enough to be thought of as good sources? I believe that most blogs are accurate and certainly they are much much more timely than academic journals. But blogs are also opinion pieces, since there is no peer-review process, a blogger is free to say whatever they want to say in their blog.
Personally I read both, kind of. I read a couple of blogs that I find interesting (although I need to read them more often) but I also read Library Journal and American Libraries, which are not scholarly journals, but are still trade journals discussing the news and trends in the field. I would subscribe to a scholarly peer-reviewed journal if I had an area of expertise or speciality in the field. Because I am still a student and not sure yet where I want to go, as of now I do not subscribe (money is also an issue).
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