I've recently encountered a blogging phenomenon known as the Blog Carnival.* If you are aware of bentley's wonderful This Week in LibraryBlogland series, then you are already familiar with the essential concept - an aggregation/roundup of the most interesting posts over a period of time, usually centering on a certain theme. What typically makes the Blog Carnival different from bentley's approach is that the Carnival closes up shop and moves to a new blog location every week. The host blog's author becomes the editor of the Carnival for that week. The advantages of this are:

a) it takes the burden off of a single person
b) new host means new setting and often a fresh editorial perspective
c) willing hosts get great exposure for their blogs and willing readers similarly get exposed to blog authors they may not have encountered previously

My first encounter with a Blog Carnival was the Carnival of Personal Finance, which was most recently hosted at Smart Money Daily and will be moving to I Will Teach You To Be Rich on Monday. [Sidenote: I've been obsessed with personal finance lately. Observe the crop of new related blogs in my blogroll.]

On further research, I discovered what appears to be the "Original Carnival" (or at least longest-running): Carnival of the Vanities, the most recent of which can be found at Wallo World. There is even an entire site devoted to helping readers find the various manifestations of the Blog Carnival.

I'm sure you can see where I'm going with this. I think now might be a great time to initiate a Carnival of our own. Our little chunk of the blogoscape is growing at a high rate and it would be nice to present something to the world that conveys the dynamic and collective power of LIS bloggery (Presence, baby, presence). Plus, I think it'd be kinda fun.

The guidelines for this kind of thing can vary widely. Some Carnivals do not relocate regularly (what's the fun in that?). Some Carnivals are based primarily on submission by blog post authors, while others are based on reader submissions and still others are more like bentley's editor-driven approach. The point is to highlight the best of the week, so I propose that such decisions be left to the host of the week, who would post guidelines and according article solicitation in the week leading up to their actual hosting gig.

As for determining the hosts, we would need some basic guidelines, but mostly it would be whoever was interested - first come, first serve. I would be happy to coordinate that process on an ongoing basis. The guidelines at the Carnival of Personal Finance dictate that:

"Any blogger who participates by submitting an article to any Carnival of Personal Finance is eligible to host. Bloggers whose articles are selected by the host without a specific submission are also eligible.
Bloggers are added to the hosting list in the order the request is received...
Bloggers who are currently on the list to host must wait until the date of their hosting before being added to the end of the list again. This allows any new participants to have a chance."

Seems reasonable enough to use as ground rules.

I have two central concerns at the outset, about which I'd like to get your feedback:

1. I don't want to step on bentley's toes or in any way obviate her efforts. She does an excellent, excellent recap of the previous week's posts. From my own experience, it takes a lot of effort to do such a thing on an ongoing basis. This would be a sort of distributed model for that kind of potentially labor-intensive aggregation. (bentley, if you're reading this, let me know what you think!)
2. Are we already so incestuous that this sort of "celebration" is totally unnecessary and offers little value for the work involved?

What do you think? Please, please send me your feedback, even if it's just a "I'd host one" or "Doesn't seem necessary." Again, I argue that this would be an avenue to establish some presence for the LIS blogosphere as a collective entity. If I get some positive comments, I'll move forward in the next week or two and we'll get this carnival rolling. Oh, and if you have a better name, I'm certainly open to that as well.

* David Faucheux also recently encountered the Blog Carnival. He put up an audio post on the topic earlier today.