explodedlibrary.info

about the name of this blog

When I was at the ALLA conference in Perth, somebody asked me this question, "Why is your blog called the exploded library?"

I shouldn't have to say this, but the exploded library is just a metaphor. I do not write about actual exploded libraries or librarians. It is always amusing (and a little disturbing) when I am referred to as the exploded librarian, but that is definitely not me.

I could go into this at great length, and I thought that I had done so already, but I couldn't find the post, not even with the new search engine which I've recently added into the blog.

Here's the short version:
The internet is a collective exploded library. Information has been exploded and scattered and broken – information is also more transient in the exploded library. Many librarians hate the exploded library (the concept, hopefully not the blog). They argue, convincingly, that it was much easier to find information when it was all bound and catalogued in libraries, selected by librarians. Although I try to keep an open mind about the value of ordering information and the short-comings of the exploded library, I am definitely biased. I like these changes. I like that information has been freed to a certain extent and that there are fewer gatekeepers for both readers and writers.

I try not to have illusions about these changes. Everybody often has a hard time finding anything relevant or good in this chaos. But we'd better learn new ways of dealing with this. Information is not going to become unexploded and easily go back into its box or shelves. Paraphrasing Dorothy Shea from her session on the Art of Reference in ALLA 2008,  this is a challenging time for librarians because if we're serious about helping people find all the relevant information (especially in law libraries), we need to have one foot in the regular ordered library and the other foot in the chaotic exploded library.

It is very difficult to be adept in both order and chaos, but that is what we must aim for. It's also ok if some librarians are better with order and others (like me) are better in chaos, so long as we can still talk to each other and learn from each other. I like to think that if librarians can bridge the dichotomy between ordered information and chaotic information, we will always be relevant.

I have been very inconsistent about what I call this blog. For the last few years, I have been in the practice of calling it the explodedlibrary. I think one reason why I did this was to make a slight distinction between the name of the blog and the concept of the exploded library. But “exploded library” is easier to write, and I might go with that for now.

blogging boundaries, work-related

I've been at my current job in the law firm library for just on six months now. During this time period, I've also increased my blogging activity. I've decided it's probably a good time to articulate how I view my blogging boundaries in this law firm environment.

There are two absolutely no go areas.

• Specific things I've been asked to find in my research work
• Any other information that is a trade secret or protected by confidentiality agreements or attorney-client privilege.

Then there’s the usual stuff which most bloggers who are employed need to be very cautious of: Not making my employer look bad, not trash talking management and co-workers, etc.

When I've worked in academic libraries, I've sometimes blogged about annoyances I've experienced with some of the vendors which the library uses. I don't recant those posts, but I won't be doing so much of that for the time being. Law firms are quite different environments from universities and my position is slightly different as well. If I need to work closely with somebody from a vendor to make an improvement or fix a problem, I wouldn't want them to be wondering if anything they say might end up on my blog. Of course, it’s different if I’m looking at things which aren’t closely related to my work.

That said, I don’t believe that it’s necessary to maintain an absolute separation between what I’m doing at work and what goes into the blog. If I discover a useful resource or technique in the course of my research, I don’t see any harm in sharing it here. The same goes with issues relevant to law libraries, if they can be discussed in a manner which doesn’t go against what I’ve said above.

Of course, I could go into more detail about all of these things, but I don't think that's going to be helpful. Underlying it all is keeping to a certain ethic. And all this is just about the work-related boundaries. I could have another post about respecting personal boundaries in this blog.

a new look and different attitude, or the last guttering of the candle...?

Three posts in one night is kind of unprecedented for me.

I've been feeling dissatisfied with this blog ever since a couple of posts after I resurrected it earlier this year. It's almost been undead, not quite dead and not quite alive, a shadow of its former self.

I've decided that it's time that I either put this blog out of its misery for good, or I try something different with it.

I've chosen the latter option, for now. All I can promise is this - it won't be as good. There will be fewer pretty pictures and more typos and writing errors. But it may also be more interesting and less self-conscious. We'll see.

sometimes endings end

I have decided that it's time to re-open the explodedlibrary. I had been blogging for over five years, and have learned that it is not straight forward to just stop it. For one thing, this blog is irrevocably linked with me. Even if I deleted this blog, that would be true. When people search for me, the first thing they find is this blog. With this blog closed, it may appear that I haven't said or done anything or thought about anything since November 2007. Of course that's not true.

My life has changed during the last few months. There were some things going on last year which were making it very difficult to blog. As I wrote in the bunker,

Mergers and acquisitions happen all the time amongst organizations associated with libraries. One's happened to MPOW. Yes, mergers and acquisitions happen all the time, but a merger amongst true equals seems to be extremely rare. There usually is a dominant party and a subordinate party. It has turned out that my place of work is on the losing end of this merger. There is now an integration process underway. Integration after a merger is a strange process. The integration that I'm experiencing means that the subordinate party is completely disintegrated and then parts of it are absorbed into the dominant party and the rest is discarded.

A little over a month after I wrote that, my library had been shut down. I could have had a job in the big university library if I had wanted it, but I decided that it was a good time to move on from that university and looked elsewhere. Fortunately I found something good without too much stress and botheration. It was very painful to go through this merger - the uncertainty and lack of information about the process, the depressing thought that our users would be worse off and there wasn't anything that could be done about it.

A few months later on, I am starting to view this as one of those odd twists which life takes, and as horrible as it was to go through it then, now I can see that it has opened doors which I never would have braved.

So my life has changed. I've had enough of a break from blogging that I feel excited about getting back into it. Not that I'm going to be posting very frequently, probably three posts a month will be a very good month. I'm also working on liberariesinteract.info again, and I expect that my more conventional library posts will be going there.

even blogs have an end

This blog has seen a few changes over the years, and many in this last year. But it's not enough.

The trouble with blogging is that a blog has no natural end point. Other forms of writing all have an end. When one thing is finished, it's easier to begin something else. Yes, blogs can develop and change over time, as this one has. But there are limits to this, and after five years, I think I have reached that limit with this blog. So I've decided to retire this blog. There's another reason as well, but I'd rather not go into that here.

I still haven't got blogging out of my system. I'm not giving it up, I'm just winding down this blog. There are one or two more posts in the pipeline, and once I've published them in the next month or so, I'll be taking an indefinite break from updating this blog.

I'm planning on taking a complete break from blogging. Then I'll probably start a new one. The new one won't be as closely related to my work as a librarian - the place for those kinds of posts is here. To reiterate, I'm not shutting down this blog and I'm not ruling out the possibility that I may bring it out of retirement when some time has passed.

I'd like to finish with some thank yous. Thanks to all the bloggers who encouraged me at the very beginning in 2002, who linked to me and made me feel welcome in what was then such a small community. Thanks also to amazing group of Australian librarian bloggers at librariesinteract.info. It was fun and also a privilege working with you and learning from you. Thanks to everyone who commented on posts. I appreciate your contribution and wish I had been a little more diligent to replying to your comments on the blog. Finally, thanks to the readers who have stuck with me over the years and put up with my irregular posting schedule and the seemingly random choice of posts.

It's not goodbye yet, because there's definitely one more post to come, maybe two.

different blogs, different masks

Sometimes I think that if I were starting blogging today, I would choose to write under a pseudonym. I think that I may have wanted that initially, but the blogging software I was using at the time - Radio userland - had a default of displaying the blogger's name. Before I learned how to turn that off, my name was already out there in links from other bloggers. It's interesting how little seemingly random accidents can have a lasting impact.

But I wasn't too worried that my name was out there. At first it seemed that my blogging life would always be quarantined from the rest of my life. It seemed like a long long time before I met any other bloggers face to face or anyone who had read my blog.

Of course everything's different now. I am aware that every word I write is potentially viewable by my past, present and future employers and co-workers, prospective girlfriends, exes, friends and enemies, all sorts of family members, including my mother. When I get an idea for a post, at some point I need to decide whether this is the sort of post I want to have on my blog, given all of this.

If I blogged under a pseudonym, I wouldn't have to worry about this. I could be more controversial and not worry about alienating the prejudiced and easily offended. There would be other things to worry about - namely protecting my secret identity. When writing about specific work or personal things, I couldn't be too detailed, or I would need to fictionalize some of the details (although that can be fun). I would need to keep other bloggers at arm's length, and would be reluctant to attend blogging meetups or be involved in a group like lint.

I do think that there are advantages and disadvantages to both kinds of authorship.

I don't buy into the "named bloggers are inherently more ethical and accurate" argument either. For me, the potential readership of this blog does make me feel personally accountable for my blogging - to play nice with others and not be sloppy in my research or writing. But just because it's like this for me, I can't assume that it's like this for everyone or that the converse is true - that anonymous/pseudonymous bloggers don't care about playing nice or checking their facts. Recently at MPOW I was put in a very unusual situation - of needing to find a shortlist of blogs in a subject I didn't know a lot about, project management. Although I feel very reticent about rating blogs, I devised a quick & dirty way that I could live with. Whether the blog was written under a pseudonym or by a named author was irrelevant. It's possible that under my criteria, a named blog by somebody who really has made a name for themselves may receive bonus points, but that's as far as it would go. If a blog - be it named or pseudonymous - contained mean-spirited ad hominem attacks, I'd probably rate it low for "quality" and give it negative bonus points.

Before I finish, I should probably mention that this post is my indirect response to the Annoyed Librarian's post on this. I have a lot of time for the Annoyed Librarian. We have a couple of things in common: we are both skeptics about the librarian shortage and we have both made fun of 2.0 stuff. I still think that the Library 2.0 label has done more harm than good. I care deeply about the components, which existed quite happily before anyone made up the lame Library 2.0 term. It still annoys me that these pre-existing technologies and ideas have been co-opted by Library 2.0, when I think they would have been better off left on their own. Mark my words, it won't be long before Library 2.0 sounds as cringe worthy as that mid-1990s gem "information superhighway." Where I differ from the Annoyed Librarian is that I do care about advancing much of what has been labelled Library 2.0. Because of this, I have been willing to jump on the Library 2.0 bandwagon when it's helped me communicate and work with colleagues, and then I jump off again and it's been ok.

See also

the power and/or vulnerability of named and anonymous bloggers (July 2005)

in flux

People who read this blog in readers won't see it, but I have changed the look of this blog - the first significant change in over 4 years. The change is long overdue. One reason why I kept that design for so long was that I haven't seen many blogs in yellow and white, and those colours almost seemed like a personal trademark, and so I thought that I might as well keep them. I come across way too many books and articles about branding at MPOW and I wonder if I have absorbed some of those ideas. A blog is a brand of sorts, and it pays to have some consistency of message and look. Of course, stagnation is even worse than lack of consistency. This is a very different blog from what it was four years ago, and it's about time that the look reflected that. For one thing, I now have more posts with images and so it makes sense to have a design which enhances and is enhanced by the graphics. I'm glad that I found a design which has a similar look to the old design, so there is still some consistency.

When I first chose the name of this blog, I thought that the name sounded interesting and was an apt metaphor for what was happening with information and libraries. I was not expecting that the ideas behind this metaphor would continue to develop and evolve and sweep me along with it. At first I was thinking about how I might survive and cope as chaos infiltrated my work as a librarian. Now the chaos is no longer quite so new and scary, and I am thinking about how I can use it and thrive in it.

dealing with clutter in the blog reader

I used to stress out about information overload - it was one of the early themes of this blog in 2002 and 2003. Even when I stopped writing about it, it would still bother me when after a break from blog reading, I'd see over 1000 unread blog posts in my reader. I would struggle to read/skim through that huge pile and afterwards would feel totally drained.

I'm sure somebody would tell me that I'm subscribing to too many blogs. That if I removed some of this clutter, this problem wouldn't be so bad. I've tried that and it didn't solve all of my problems. I found it even more draining to go through all the blogs I've subscribed to with a critical eye, evaluating whether this blog was worthy to be on my radar at all. The more I thought about each blog, the more complicated the decision would become. I would end up reducing the number of blogs I subscribed to, but I wonder whether it was worth all of the effort that it took. And then after I did that, of course the number would only increase again as I discovered more interesting blogs and added them to my reader. Some people deal with that problem by setting a number which will be the definite number of blogs they subscribe to - so that if you add a new blog, you have to remove another. That didn't work for me either - it just made me not want to add any new blogs because it was such a hassle to get rid of one, and so my reading list atrophied for a while until I just gave up and started adding without removing. The other problem with that is that not all blogs publish with the same frequency, so that number of blogs subscribed to is not going to determine how many blog posts you'll be reading.

I've found that over the past few months, I've developed a different way of dealing with clutter in the blog reader. It's messy but it works for me. I'm offering this not as a prescription which everyone should follow, but just as an alternative.

Here's the key thing. The number of blogs you subscribe to does not equal the number of blogs that you pay close attention to. There needn't be this dichotomy between subscribe and dump. That dichotomy is an anachronism from print. There can be all sorts of degrees to which you pay attention to a blog. There are some blogs which I read every day, more than every day if they update more frequently. Other ones, every few days, or every week or so, or every month - basically whenever I'm in the mood.

This leads onto another important point. It's not important to know everything that's happening as soon as it happens. That's why it's ok for a blog in your reader to languish unread for a month. It's not as if we're journalists working for rival newspapers who all want the big scoop and that being first to press is so important. I think there's value in unearthing the recent and not so recent past. It's probably true that most blog posts get buried without making much of an impact. This could be for all sorts of reasons - maybe it wasn't a good post or maybe it was a good post, but it was published on a big news day when everybody else was distracted by something else.

Deal with the volume not by unsubscribing, but by promoting and demoting. If I find that a blog has been posting too much, or what it has been posting hasn't been all that interesting, I'll demote it. This means I'll read it less often. But if I take another look at it in a few weeks and it's got some good stuff, I'll promote it back to where it was. I use a tag in the Google Reader called "key blogs", this is the one that I check several times a day. I also have more descriptive tags, e.g. "Australian librarians", if I demote a blog from this group, I tag it "Australian librarians01" and so on, 02, 03 etc. That's how I organize it - the hope is that the good rises to the top and the mediocre sinks into obscurity, but being flexible to cope with constant changes in the blogosphere and my own preferences.

I'm not saying that I never unsubscribe to blogs. If a blog really annoys or offends me, I will unsubscribe to it, that's if I don't give it the idiots or z-list tag.

I don't think it's an accident that I developed this method after switching to the Google reader. There's no reason why these ideas couldn't be adapted to work with other readers. Sometimes I still use NetNewsWire. This method could work there, but I'd have to change its preferences to turn off its feature of showing number of unread posts in its dock icon. I've decided that that is not a helpful number. I used to stress about getting it to zero and think I wasted a lot of time and energy doing that. I'd much rather ignore that number and focus on enjoying what I like reading.

return of the comment spammers

It's been odd - in the last 2 weeks there's been an exponential increase in the number of comment spam attempts on this blog. It's all been unsuccessful because of the comment moderation, but it's still inconvenient if only because I get the email notification of each attempt. Some of these are quite vile. Are any other bloggers experiencing the same thing right now? Legitimate comments are welcome :)

unearthing the bunker

For the last 18 months, I've maintained a companion blog, the explodedlibrary bunker. It's been a place where I've kept the occasional draft, discard, aside and rant which never made it to the here, the main blog. It's been a space for venting and experiments. I'm thinking of taking this blog in a slightly new direction and a part of this would involve making more use of the bunker. Because there's going to be more interplay between these two blogs, I've decided that it's time to announce its existence.