Icebreaker

Ever have a situation where you attend some event, or do something, because you think you ought to, and you’re initially slightly grudging of your time there because it’s a professional related event, it’s after a long day at work and you’d rather be home with a cold beer and your feet up and watching My Name is Earl… but you attend the event anyway because you think you should, and it turns out to be really really interesting, you learn stuff!, and you get invited to talk at two forthcoming events?

Last night was the West Australian Academic and Research Libraries (ARL) Group‘s first ‘icebreaker’ meeting for 2006, the annual Library Studies Student Awards Night. We were treated to presentations from the winners of the 2005 ARL/DA Information Services awards for best research essay or presentation. There were four winners, but two of them are currently overseas, so we had two presentations, from Janine van der Kooy, Curtin University, and Matthew Hayes, Central Metro TAFE.

I took notes, just in case I could blog the event, and I’m glad I did – Janine’s presentation in particular was of personal interest to me. Her topic: The Information Profession and the Blogosphere! For her Masters Janine examined blogs by library professionals and considers that there are two main types of blogs, personal blogs and what she terms as ‘filter’ blogs. Personal blogs are the classic journals, which don’t provide links to any external sites; filter blogs do link, and are usually topic oriented. She found that of the blogs by library people she surveyed (700+? I don’t seem to have made a note of the number of blogs she looked at!), there are more filter blogs than personal, which apparently is opposite to most other findings.

How would she classify this blog, I wonder? A combination of filter and personal? (There was a lot more to her talk but I didn’t note it all down – must get a copy!)

Janine suggests that more research is needed, answering these questions:

1. Who reads blogs, and why?
2. How do we determine the value of blogs? She pointed out that approaches which attempt to count the number of links to a blog and assume a value associated with links are flawed (think citation counts for academic articles – *shudder!*) and ignore The Long Tail. (all those blogs that don’t have that many links to them – but are still read.)
3. How do we preserve both the content and the networks created by the blogosphere?

I asked a couple of questions after Janine’s presentation. How many Australian librarian bloggers did she find? She said there are quite a number, and some of them are Big Names in the library blogosphere (she didn’t use the term biblioblogosphere). I’ve got her email address and will get in touch to see if I can get a copy of her findings. I also asked if Janine herself blogged? She said she does but it’s completely personal, and she wasn’t going to tell me where – heh!

Matthew’s presentation was quite different, an account of some observational research he did, to determine whether it would be better to hold ‘family oriented’ activities at a public library on the weeknights when local shops are open. (Note to non-West Australian readers: retail trading hours in Western Australia are regulated – most shops have to close at 5 or 6pm every evening, and are only allowed to open until 9pm one night of the week, usually Thursday.)

Matthew was funny, and interesting to listen to, and his musings on the reasons for conducting research, the problems associated with planning research and what to do when your findings differ from your expectations (his were inconclusive) were useful reminders to those of us thinking of conducting any sort of research.

During the post-presentation chat two librarians asked me if I would speak at a couple of events they are planning, about blogging. (I don’t know why they didn’t ask Janine to talk – maybe because she is expecting a baby in June?) I’ve tentatively said yes. One of the sessions will be in May – and the Uber Boss, who was in the audience, suggested to the librarian who is organising this session that I might have something to contribute!!

I had no inkling that the evening was going to be so interesting, and I’m very glad I attended.

When I got home, I had a cold beer, put my feet up and watched an episode of My Name is Earl anyway.

Picture of my sarong-clad legs. Just because.

Categories: work, librarianship, blogging, ARL, ALIA