Eight Years!

This blog is eight years old today!

I’ve not been very good at observing or celebrating this anniversary. Last year it went unremarked.

Thinking about why I’m still blogging, eight years on, I remembered the paper I wrote, way back in 2006, about blogging. And at this point I say, thank goodness for institutional repositories (and yay me for having the foresight to deposit it!) because I couldn’t find my own copy.

I called it Creating Community: The Blog as a Networking Device, and a lot of what I wrote back then – even if it seems an eternity ago – still holds true, I think. I argued that, far being being a waste of time, blogging is a useful and maybe even essential, tool for librarians to participate in “conversation” within our profession and outside our profession, to engage outside the bounds of our libraries and connect widely with others.

In 1986, Bechtel¹ argued that libraries should be seen as ‘centers for conversation’, with librarians as ‘mediators of and participants in the conversation of the world’ (p. 219). Conversation, she suggested, should be the ‘controlling paradigm’ (p.220) by which we continually strive to improve the services we provide. By conversation, she was referring to that ‘essential activity of human beings and one that informs, critically evaluates, and provides energy and renewal for their life together’ (p.221).

Writing at a time when electronic sources and tools were beginning to make inroads into book-dominated libraries, and when librarians were debating the future of libraries and our responses to the impact of new technologies, Bechtel suggested that librarians’ identification with and attachment to the book would doom us to being little more than custodians of ‘warehouses for the storage of books and other materials, rather than hearts or centers of intellectual activity’ (p.220). For Bechtel, the primary task of libraries is to ‘seek primarily to collect people and ideas rather than books and to facilitate conversation among people rather than merely to organize, store and deliver information’ (p.221)

Bechtel was referring to academic libraries, primarily, but I believe that her conversation paradigm can be applied equally to libraries in all sectors. By participating in conversations with our users, and ‘seeking to understand and meet the needs of the library user’ (Bechtel, 1986, p.220), we avoid being too inwardly focused, we maintain our focus and mission, and we remember that the library is a part of the community it serves.

As access to the World Wide Web began to increase, ‘hypertext’ was quickly seen as ‘a liberating and empowering technology’, one that would ‘capitalize on the book’s strengths while transcending its weaknesses’ (Harris & Hannah, 1996 p.7). Ten [seventeen!] years ago, librarians acknowledged that where the collection was once pre-eminent in ensuring that we were able to meet the needs of our users, with the Web as the delivery technology, ‘the linkage between access and ownership has been severed’ (Harris & Hannah, 1996, p. 8). This remains the case today, and continues to be a difficult issue as greater proportions of the budgets of academic and research libraries are diverted to pay for licensed (as opposed to owned) materials. How are we to meet the challenges posed by online behemoths such as Google, with its search engine, provision of scholarly content, and digitisation scheme (just to name a few)?

Interestingly, this same ‘conversation’ is happening now, with some librarians (Library 2.0) arguing within the blogosphere, that the main focus for libraries should be to participate in conversation with our users. The discussion has largely been inspired by one much discussed work, The Cluetrain Manifesto (Levine, Locke, Searls, & Weinberger, 2000), which states that ‘markets are conversations’ (p. xii), and argues that business needs to use the communication channels provided by the Internet more effectively, to listen to the conversations that the Internet is enabling, and participate in these conversations or go under. A recent Pew Internet and American Life Project survey of ‘technology leaders, scholars, industry officials, and interested members of the public’ listed the following statement by an interviewee: ‘Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy. The Net will wear away institutions that have forgotten how to sound human and how to engage in conversation’ (Fox, Anderson, & Rainie, 2005). These statements echo similar arguments that were being voiced ten (Harris & Hannah, 1996) and twenty (Bechtel, 1986) years ago. The blog is a tool we can utilise to participate more fully in these conversations.

Blogging’s been one of the most important things I’ve done for myself in this last decade.

It has helped me to broaden my view and look outside the confines of the library I work in. Along the way I have made many professional connections. I’d forgotten I interviewed a few librarian bloggers for the paper:

‘Yes, I strongly agree that blogging has improved my professional practice. …One of the things I do in my professional blog is keep track of articles I read for professional development. It also helps me keep track of ideas to develop, so the positives outweigh the small negatives. I think I continue because what started as an experiment has turned out to be an excellent reflective tool and a great way to grow professionally.’
Angel, academic librarian, US (http://gypsylibrarian.blogspot.com)

‘I am more up to date on current trends and tend to read things more thoroughly if I am going to write about them. I also have fabulous contacts developed from the blogging community who I can consult. My employer has been in awe of this development; moreover, they are very pleased that my higher profile has been good publicity for the firm, even though I never identify the firm itself in my blogs.’
Connie Crosby, library manager of a private law firm in Toronto,Canada (http://conniecrosby.blogspot.com)

‘I feel like blogging has made me part of a community (some might say a club though I don’t think it’s an exclusive one) of many of the most talented and creative librarians in the English-speaking world…’
Laura Crossett (http://www.newrambler.net )

‘Being involved in the blogosphere has made me feel more in touch with the professional community, internationally. It’s an excellent way of keeping up with current issues… rather like being able to drop in on the chatty bits of a conference for a few minutes every day. …Basically it’s all about communication, which I think is a good thing, although I have some sympathy for those who groan at the thought of yet more communication. Since I’ve been using Bloglines I’ve found it a lot easier to manage the growing number of blogs I like to keep an eye on, without it taking up too much time.’
Alison Williams ( http://ml107.blogspot.com/ )

I’ve made many friends. I agree with Carly Findlay, “The boundaries of “in real life” and on the Internet are broken.” A friend is a friend is a friend.

Blogging’s improved my confidence. It’s inevitable, really, if you keep writing down what you think, and putting it out there. (I highly recommend it.)

Blogging’s improved my writing. Working on my writing skills is an ongoing project!

The other thing I don’t think much about, but it’s supremely important, is the fact that blogging’s made me into a confident learner. No one trained me in blogging. I learned.

Sure, it takes time, and none of the benefits happen instantly (does anything important and really valuable happen without a bit of effort?). But it’s been worth it!

The blog’s had a few different looks in these eight years. It started out being hosted at blogspot, then I moved it to my own paid hosting with my own domain.

A year ago it got hacked and during its resurrection (thanks M 🙂 ) I changed its URL slightly. It was always called “Ruminations” until a few weeks ago, when, on a whim, I took the word off. It’s now just flexnib.

¹Bechtel, J. (1986). Conversation, a new paradigm for librarianship? College &
Research Libraries, 47(3), 219 – 224.