creating an identity

I’m a member of the organizing committee of the 2011 Australian Law Librarians’ Association (ALLA) conference. The conference is going to be here in Canberra towards the end of September. Its theme is ACTioning the Law.*

One of my tasks has been to create an online identity for the conference.

I’ve made some of the basic components, a web site (not quite finished yet, all of this stuff will be launched next week), registering a domain name, creating a Gmail account and finally, a Twitter account. But really, the work involved seems minuscule compared with the amount of internet magic involved.

Creating this new identity for the conference has got me thinking about my own online identity and how it’s been virtually non-existent lately. For a while I was thinking that the explodedlibrary blogging identity was already dead, and that if I were to ever blog again, it would need to be a complete “reboot” with a different name.

I’ve decided not to do that, for now. It’s been so long that I feel as if I’m a new blogger again.

Where did I go and what’s happened?

A dysfunctional workplace will put my blogging into a coma. Maybe it would be different if I felt I could write publicly about the dysfunction. Without going into details, the actual library and the work I did there was fine and enjoyable, but the relationship between the library and the branch in charge of it was completely dysfunctional. When I’m working in a stressful environment, I find that when I get home, I need to un-stress. For me, that means doing stuff that has nothing whatsoever to do with my work. This blog has always been work-related to some extent, and that was a real problem when I needed a complete break from work during my evenings and weekends.

But things are different now. I have a new librarian job in a different federal government agency in Canberra. It’s a change for the better, and I’m returning home from work feeling more energized than drained. I feel that it's possible for me to blog again.

Maybe a recent death in my family has caused me to tire of this fallow phase. My dear aunt deserved many more years of good health than what she had. Life’s not fair and terrible things can happen at any time to anyone. I don’t know how many years I have left. I’d rather use the time I have left doing something I believe in, than immersing myself in frivolous past times which ultimately mean nothing - although my Worgen mage was getting so close to be getting ready for heroic dungeons in World of Warcraft Cataclysm :)

I’ve been thinking about getting back into blogging for some time and I think that in 2011 it’s going to be different from previous years. I view myself as a law librarian but the majority of my posts have been about library issues rather than legal issues. I think the balance will be shifting this year and I’m more interested in following legal issues, particularly developments in consumer and competition law. But I also plan to resume following the general conversations which librarians are having and participate in those when I have something to say.