explodedlibrary.info

my return to law library land

A lot has happened in the last couple of months. My normal inclination is to write one humungous post where I try to make sense of everything, but I don’t think that such a post will ever be finished - at least not before my life has moved on and I’m thinking about other things.

So here’s one part of it. My new job.

For some reason this job seems totally different, even if it’s not. After all, I’ve worked as a law librarian before - that’s what I did when I first started blogging. Being a law librarian was my initial goal when I decided to become a librarian.

The difference is that my previous law library position was in an academic law library. The majority of my career has been in academic libraries, but this new job is with a big law firm.

In Australia, law firm blogging doesn’t seem to have taken off in the same way that it has in the US. For the time being, I’d rather not mention the particular firm where I work. It’s no dark secret (actually I am really glad to be working for this particular firm), but once I mention that word here, my name and my employers become inextricably linked through Google and other search engines. Later on I may change my mind and provide those details. That’s fine and I’d rather err by being over-cautious in the beginning. After all, if I say everything now, I can’t unsay that later on.

My initial impression is that being a law firm librarian is very different from being an academic law librarian and it’s also different from non-legal special library positions I’ve had.

One big difference from being an academic law librarian, is that in the law firms, information is not meant to be free. It is expensive and it is power and there are some boundaries which it is not permitted to cross.

The most obvious boundary is attorney-client privilege.

Another way that information is constrained are by Chinese Walls, to use the un-PC Australian colloquial term. Other words include firewalls and cones of silence. Whatever you call them, these are used when one firm represents different parties with different interests about something. It would not be a good idea to have information flowing freely between the lawyers representing these different interests.

I’ve noticed another aspect of this information exchange issue. When I receive a research request, I don’t usually receive a whole lot of background or contextual information. It was very different in academic libraries, where I saw reference interviews which resembled interrogations. It is true that more contextual information usually helped the research process.

The more I’ve started to think about this, I wonder if maybe this lack of context is a mercy. After all, it would be quite disturbing for me to to hear detailed information about how my work was facilitating behaviour by individuals or companies which were at odds with my own personal values.

This leads to the next big issue on my mind, which will be the topic of my next post. It is important for me to go to work knowing that I am doing good of some sort in the world. At the very least, I don’t want to be causing harm.

How are these concerns resolved in the law firm environment?

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.

the writing games

This may have happened when I was in my high school’s badminton team. We were a bunch of friends playing together and badminton was a good excuse to hang out, but we weren’t exactly a great team. I think the only times we ever received any points was when the other side forfeited. One day we booked the gym for some badly needed practice. We showed up and found that there'd been a mixup with the booking and our court had been double-booked with the volleyball team. My badminton team wasn’t exactly super-dedicated, we may have walked away if it wasn’t for the volleyball team’s superior attitude, just assuming we’d defer to them. We ended up both stubbornly playing in the space. The two games shared a similar net and similar sized court - the different sets of lines were already drawn into floor. Having two different games being played on the same court was not an ideal situation. One of my friends had a volleyball pelted into his shoulder. But I guess that it's not nice to be hit on the face with a badminton shuttle or hit on the elbow with a badminton racquet. The joint practice was not a success. After that the two teams generally loathed each other.

This is not a real allegory where every little detail has meaning. The chaotic image of two different games happening in the same space recently came to mind when I was thinking about the relationship between blogging and other writing forms – particularly academic writing and journalism.

No analogy is ideal. This writing as a game analogy may suggest that writing is a trivial activity, that it's just a game. But I think games are important microcosms of reality. Each game has its own distinct ways of winning and losing and participation. The different games require different skills and attract different sorts of players. Some people play to win, others do it for the money, some just like to show off their skills. Some people play simply to have fun or because the game is a group activity and they like the camaraderie with the other players.

Each game regards itself as more important and interesting than the other games. Often the players of one game may have a negative view of the other games. For example, a blogger may view academic writing as anachronistic and elitist. An academic writer may view blogging as a meaningless low-brow game or a hideously bastardized version of their own game.

One way of looking at these different forms of writing is to be relativistic – each of these games serves different functions and attracts different sorts of people. Actually I’d better stop right now. In the next part of this post ["why I choose blogging", written on 15 August 2007], I’ll explore the non-relativistic path.

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.

using Google Reader for blogging when I'm not blogging

Like many other bloggers lately, I'm switching to the Google Reader for my day-to-day reading of blogs. I was not unhappy with the NewsGator Online + NetNewsWire combination I had been using, and I expect to use them occasionally. The one feature about the Google Reader which I really liked and could not resist is the ability to share posts so easily. That's what's powering the new "what I'm reading" sidebar item. These links are also available in a feed. It seems like a really easy way of making a linkblog. These days I am not exactly a prolific writer, but I generally do keep up my reading. Being able to publish a linkblog so easily is a way of blogging when I'm not really blogging. It's something I might be able to do on my mobile phone [go to google.com/reader/m and log in], when I'm on the train. I spend a lot of time on the train. Who knows, if I can do some of my blog reading on the train - maybe I'll have more time for writing when I'm at home?

Currently playing in iTunes: Sadder Than You by Angus & Julia Stone

Visiting Tasmania for 2 weeks

This is just to let everybody know that I'm having a little holiday in Tasmania for approximately 2 weeks. Posting will be light, although there are a couple of things I've already drafted which may go up. Moderation of comments and trackbacks and responses to any emails will be slightly delayed. Apologies in advance for any inconvenience.

when the internet is down

I'm not usually one to apologize for lack of updates, but I feel that an explanation is in order for the last month. It seems that there is some ongoing issue with my local phone exchange at Springwood, which has been causing intermittent outages in my ADSL connection. At least this is if I believe my ISP, who swear that the problem is caused by the phone lines, not by them.

It's amazing how a thing like this can put a spanner in the works, particularly in my blogging. It's very frustrating to think of a post and not be able to write or post it. It's not the same to draft something offline and then post it later, because often for me, writing and reading and research all go together. If I can't check sources and make links while I'm writing, I don't feel that I'm really writing a blog post - at the most drafting a post offline is like preparation for writing a post.

At least for me, every idea for a post only has a certain window of time to be published, and when that time expires, it is usually time to move on, even if it seemed like a really good idea originally. Things change, and what was interesting a month ago may seem a little stale if it's posted tomorrow.

Anyway, because it's such an almighty pain for me when the internet is down at home and I have no idea when it will return, I have arranged for limited dialup internet access as a backup. It's slow but at least it's reliable.

bushfire worries

I knew that bushfire danger was one of the downsides of living in the Blue Mountains, but I didn't expect to be worrying about it in my very first summer here. There have been fires burning in unpopulated areas of the mountains for about a week now. Now it's hot and dry and windy and the fires are moving closer to towns. Most recently, I heard that there are two new spotfires not far from Linden, which is the neighbouring town to Faulconbridge, where I live.

I'll be taking the day off tomorrow, so that I'll be close by - just in case. My main worry is that even if the main fire doesn't get really close, there's still a chance of an ember attack.

Hopefully it will be fairly quiet and the winds will change (for the better) and things will be fine.

4:30 pm update: It looks as if the particular spotfire I was most worried about has been waterbombed and contained. That's a relief for the time being, but until the winds change, there's a chance other spotfires will develop.

On Vox: the accidental

   
   

It is the most natural and comfortable thing in life to sink into a rut. Our routines aren't usually just blind habit, they usually develop that way for very good reasons. I don't think that ruts are bad per se, but that it is good to be aware of them. Sometimes the only way to know that you've been in a rut is the intense feeling of oddness which occurs when for whatever reason, you step out of the rut.

» Read more on Vox

back blogging

It's been nice to have a break. It's been a real break - I haven't even been reading  all but a handful of blogs. I'm now looking forward to getting back into my regular blogging habit. The complication is that nothing stays the same, and resuming normal service cannot meant the same thing today that it meant a month ago.

I'm quite excited to see that librariesinteract.info is up and running. I've been curious about being involved in a group blog for some time, and am looking forward to contributing to this one. I've been thinking about how my contributions to  librariesinteract.info will be different from what I do here. I'm pretty sure that the explodedlibrary is a place where I'll discuss (sometimes rant about) things in more detail. I expect that in the group blog, I'll be announcing things more succinctly and with a little more objectivity - or least less bias. This also means that I'll have somewhere to palm off my collection of Australian library-related blogs.

Another difference is that I'm still quite happily experimenting with Vox - sorry, I'm out of invites right now, but I'm sure that will change. It's likely that I'll be doing most of my more personal blogging in there, which includes my photos and books that I've read. This explodedlibrary blog will refocus slightly to be both more practical (refining information that's useful for me in my work) and theoretical (pondering ideas that I'm interested in).

Breaking news and being an earlyish adopter of tech toys is not really my thing, but I do have a little of this tonight. I've been mucking around with some of  the widgets I can use with TypePad. One of the more interesting ones is the Rollyo widget which is current near the top of my left sidebar. It allows you to search the Australian library blogosphere. Use the drop down menu to access the custom search, ozliblog search, which searches this blog and most of the other more active Australian library blogs. It still needs a bit of tweaking, I set up the current configuration in less than five minutes. It will be helpful to me if no one else, because it will help me refind old posts when I only have the vauguest idea of what I had written.

I'm also trying the category cloud, which I like so far and will probably keep. There's also the opinmind widget, which shows little quotes from this blog. I wasn't sure if it's more interesting or annoying, so I'm testing it here.

first impressions of Vox and pondering the big blogging conundrum

I'm taking a break from this hiatus to mention a new blogging service I've been playing around with lately. Vox (previously known as Comet) is a Six Apart product, currently on an invitation-only preview release. Here's my very rudimentary Vox page. I don't quite know how to describe it. Is it the love child of LiveJournal and TypePad? It seems a bit more polished than LiveJournal, but it lacks all of the customization I'm used to with TypePad. Most annoyingly, Vox does not allow comments from non-Vox members, which damages its blogging credentials - even LiveJournal allows this as an option. The other thing that it's missing is the creation of communities, such as http://community.livejournal.com/libraries/. On the other hand, it has some appealing privacy features. I like the idea of having one blog where I can publish things to the entire world, but also allows me to have posts viewable only by friends or family. I particularly like how it's "friends or family" - because the two groups are very distinct, there's all sorts of things I'd like to share with friends which I wouldn't want my mother reading and vice versa. Even so, Vox isn't alone in offering this. I recall that Yahoo 360 offers customizable access levels - but that didn't appeal to me in other ways. Also, LiveJournal, with its friend filtering, allows this as well.

Edit: Here's some more background about Vox.

The big blogging conundrum, as I experience it, is that I want to share my experiences with other people and make connections that way, but I still have expectations of privacy. I don't want to share everything I write with everyone. My solution has been to scatter my writing - from the explodedlibrary to the explodedlibrary bunker to my LiveJournal to a password-protected blog for close friends and family. And it's not working. I'm spread too thin. It's also because of various changes in my life, I have less time for blogging than I used to.

Not everybody is as reserved as me and has these problems with mixing the private and the public. Good for them - we all need to find our own answers to these questions

I had better finish now before I start rambling - but I'm glad that the act of writing tonight has given me some ideas to ponder of how to find a better mix.

customer service by chat

So I've just moved. Until I have broadband internet access set up at my new place, please excuse if I'm slow at replying to emails, moderating comments or indeed reading many blog posts. As well as all the unpacking and setting things up for a new household, I am also trying to get reconnected at home.

Seeing that I don't enjoy making (or receiving) phone calls to call centres, I thought that I'd try out the chat system offered by one of the bigger players in the Australian telco market. Big waste of time.

Things were going ok up until the point when I checked to see if they supported Macs - knowing before that they used to have issues with Macs. Just after telling me that Mac OS 10.4 should be ok, the customer service rep. asked me, "which version of windows does it have?" I explained, patiently and tactfully I hope, how that wasn't relevant.

There was a pause for several minutes - and then the chat session was abrubtly ended. I can only assume that he hung up on me. It's a bit of a worry.

I am asking myself - did I waste as much time this way as I would have if I'd phoned them, waited on hold for 5-10 minutes, and then spoken to the same clueless person over the phone? Maybe not, but I am guessing that it would have been easier for me to ask for this person's supervisor as soon as I started having doubts about his expertise. Also, if my experience at Vodafone is anything to go by, it's very rare for a call centre operator to be allowed to hang up on a customer. We were only allowed to do it when they started swearing at us and we had warned them that we would not put up with that sort of language. Released calls were monitored and counted, just like everything else, and always had to be justified. Maybe the online chatting is still so new that it's not monitored as vigourously.

Which is quite short-sighted - after all it would be very difficult for me to post an audio recording (or even transcript) of a call centre exchange on the web - but it was very easy to take a screen shot and post this on the web. It makes me think about virtual reference in libraries too - with a different medium comes different expectations and standards.

4 things

A little while ago I realized that I was tagged by Laura.

I've found it interesting watching this meme pass through librarian bloggers. There was a time when I got overloaded by these sort of memes in LiveJournal, but it's been a little while now, so let's give this a shot.

4 jobs I've had
- Law Librarian
- Special Librarian (including one position where I was responsible for Competitive Intelligence)
- Customer Experience Executive - this was my job title at the Vodafone call centre
- Senior Secretary - my job title for when I once worked as a Faculty Secretary at the University of Minnesota, where I learned great word processing skills

4 Movies (very hard to pick out four - these are just ones that are memorable to me right now)
- I <3 Huckabees
- 21 Grams
- Donny Darko
- Magnolia

4 Places I've lived
- Toowoomba, Queensland, Australia (where I was born and spent the first couple of years of my life)
- Hobart, Tasmania, Australia (where I grew up - one of the prettiest small cities in the world)
- St Paul, Minnesota, USA (I lived in the area close to Grand and Summit Avenues and the Cathedral)
- Sydney, New South Wales, Australia (Wolli Creek, Alexandria, Randwick, Smithfield and Burwood)

4 TV Shows
- Dr Who
- Angel (or Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Firefly)
- Farscape
- Six Feet Under

4 Places I've gone on vacation
- Alaska (Anchorage, Chugach State Park, Seward)
- Maria Island, Tasmania
- Oahu, Hawaii
- Grand Portage, Minnesota

4 Sites I visit daily
- Sydney Morning Herald
- LiveJournal
- Salon.com
- TypePad

4 places I would rather be right now
- South Cape Bay, Tasmania
- Grand Marais, Minnesota
- Mt Victoria, NSW
- Glenrock

4 books (or series)
- Stephen Donaldson, the Gap series
- Ursula le Guin, Earthsea trilogy
- George Eliot, Middlemarch
- Richard Flanagan, Death of a river guide

4 songs
- Bjork, Vespertine, Undo
- Aimee Mann, The Forgotten Arm, Video
- Kylie Minogue, Come into my World (Fischerspooner remix)
- Sarah Blasko, Sweet November

4 cars I've owned
- 1974 Ford Escort (Australian model)
- 1994 Honda Civic hatch
- 1998 Toyota Corolla
- 2001 VW Jetta

4 video games I can (and do) play over and over
- World of Warcraft
- The Sims  (my computer can't handle the Sims2, but I'm still enjoying Makin' Magic anyway)
- Grand Theft Auto: Vice City & San Andreas (no, not so much for the random violence - but cruising around listening to retro music and doing jumps)
- Avernum 3

4 of my favorite dishes
- Fresh fruit, particularly cherries, mangoes, blueberries, nectarines, apples, pears, mandarins
- my Dad's spaghetti bolognese
- Ash e Reshteh (a Persian soup)
- Pad Thai

4 bloggers I'm tagging
- Real Public Librarian
- misseli
- Connecting Librarian
- Vampire Librarian

moving to the Blue Mountains

Lots of things have been happening in my life lately. One big thing is that I'm moving to the Blue Mountains in 2 weeks.

I'm very excited and am looking forward to the move. There are many positives and only a few negatives.

• cheaper real estate prices means that I'll  be able to live in a bigger place (house not apartment) without any flatmates
• I'm looking forward to living in a slightly cooler climate which has more autumn colours and more of a winter than Sydney
• it will be nice in an area of enormous World Heritage-listed natural beauty, surrounded - a place that seems like a bushwalker's / hiker's paradise
• to grossly generalize, people in the Blue Mountains seem friendlier and less in your face than people in Sydney. It seems like a more cohesive community which has a lot to offer artists and writers. [are bloggers writers? For me, it's a similar question as to whether photographers are artists. It depends on the intention. At any rate, I'm looking forward to meeting other Blue Mountains bloggers]
• being close enough to Sydney that I will be able to keep my job there and enjoy other things which the city has to offer
• the big big minus (other than the possibility of bushfires) is that I'm going to have a longer commute to work.

I'll need to allow for 2 hours travel time, including a 90 minute train ride between Central station and Faulconbridge. I'm hoping that this time can be used productively for things like reading, writing (blog entries among other things - this post was drafted on the train), unwinding and snoozing.

Once the hassles of moving are over, I'm hoping that the Blue Mountains will be the best of both worlds for me. Close enough for the good things of the city, while offering an escape to a friendlier quieter place on my weekends and evenings.

information prices and information rights

I will play Devil's Advocate for a moment and argue that it is a good thing that information can be so expensive - especially the business and legal information which I am somewhat familiar with. After all, if people are accustomed to paying a premium to receive expensive information quickly, they will be more willing to pay a librarian who is adept at finding this information quickly and efficiently. It is probably a good thing if the price of information increases, because then the size of this information marketplace will increase, eventually leading to more jobs in the field and/or better salaries for people with the necessary skills.

On the other hand, I believe that sometimes information is a fundamental human right. In the same way that a child has a right to an education irrespective of the finances of her/his parents, people need access to certain information (and have basic information finding and evaluating skills) to be able to function in today's society. If I were a public librarian or a school librarian, my job would be directly about helping people in this way. As a special librarian who works in a non-public library, my contribution must necessarily be less direct. My first duty is to my particular library and its users (neglecting this duty would lead to me soon not being any librarian at all!). Although I may not able assist with providing access to my library's physical or electronic resources, there is nothing to prevent me from sharing whatever research know how I may have, limited as it may be~

Currently playing in iTunes: Sweet November by Sarah Blasko

a little update

Even though I'm in this new job and haven't had the chance to accrue much vacation leave, I was able to take off the week between Christmas and New Year's Eve because the library was completely closed during this period. That was very nice and I was able to escape Sydney's oppressive heat by visiting Tasmania and catching up my family and friends there. I had so many fresh cherries there too - another person might have got sick of them, but I can never have too many cherries.

Now I'm  back at work and it seems as if the summer slowdown has officially ended with the orientation of this year's new MBA class. Then I  realized, wow - it's been a little while since my last blog post. It's been good to have a little holiday from blogging too.

I've enjoyed reading the 2005 retrospectives and New Year posts which some bloggers have written recently. I plan to do no such thing today - I do enough of this already from time to time.

my first phish email

I received my very first phish email. Here's how it went (and I had to retype this, because the text was actually an image):

During our regular accounts verification, it has come to our attention that your account details might be out of date or incomplete. This irregularity must be fixed by logging on to your * [I'm not naming the financial institution] Online Access account. This procedure is performed one time only and it does not require further actions on the customer side. After the account has been confirmed by logging in, your regular daily actions on * website can be continued. Follow the link below to login:

[realistic looking URL]

In our efforts to offer a competitive service and maintain a reliable database server, we are performing a regular monthly update on every account enrolled with us.

This is an automated message , no reply or confirmation is required on the customer side.

© FI. Use of the information contained on this page is governed by Australian law.

The design of the email was totally convincing - it could have been written from the FI's style guide. For a half a second I thought about going along with it, after all I have changed my address and have been meaning to tell them about this for some time. Then I remembered the golden rule against phishing: financial institutions never send these emails to their customers.

I rang them and they confirmed that they hadn't sent it. So I forwarded the email to their security section and reported the email to Google as well (Gmail has a report phishing option).

Just last night I had been reading about spear-phishing, where particular individuals are targetted because of the wealth or information which they possess. I'm doubting that spear-phishers would ever go after me, which is just as well, because regular phishing is annoying enough.

questions and answers

This post is in an FAQ format, but I hesitate to call them FAQs because they're not Frequently Asked Questions. I don't even know if they're frequently thought questions. But here goes:

Who are you?
Morgan Wilson.

That's kind of androgynous name ...
Not that it's hugely relevant to my blog, but if you don't whether to call me a her or a him - I'm a guy.

How can I contact you?
The best way, initially, would be by email. My email address is morganwilson @ gmail .com (without any spaces). I also like instant messaging, but don't usually turn on the software unless I'm planning on communicating with somebody in particular

Whereabouts do you live?
I'm living in the Blue Mountains near Sydney, Australia right now. I was born in Queensland, grew up in Tasmania, and also have lived in St. Paul, MN, USA between 1997 and 2004.

Are you really a librarian?
Yes. Originally I thought that I wanted to be a lawyer and did a B.A., LL B (my arts major was German). The most important thing that I learned at Law School was that although I enjoyed the intellectual exercise of studying law and legal research, the job of being a lawyer wasn't the thing for me. I decided to go to library school and become a law librarian. I've worked as an academic law librarian, a special librarian doing corporate research and competitive intelligence in financial services, as well as a special librarian in the electricity industry. Most of my positions have involved managing electronic information - be it in Lotus Notes databases, library websites and intranets and library automation software. I'm currently working as a Law Librarian in a large Sydney law firm. With this information, I will add the increasingly standard "the opinions and points of view expressed in my blog are my own and not my employer" disclaimer.

Why should I read your blog?
No particular reason. Sometimes I indulge in shameless self-promotion but I'm not in the mood for it tonight. Read it if you find it at all interesting and have room in your life for a not so frequently updated blog.

What sort of things do you write about?
In the explodedlibrary I write about some library-related issues. The thing is that these days, the issues affecting librarians who are searchers and consumers and managers of information, are relevant to so many more people. I try to write in a way that engages those who are and aren't library people, avoiding the odious jargon, especially words which start with "biblio". I also do some reviews of software, mostly Mac, and occasional posts about law (particularly intellectual property), politics and anything else which takes my fancy. There's more than a few posts about blogging itself. If you hate blogs and contemplate metablogging with revulsion, you may want to stay away.

Do you have any other blogs?
Yes, the explodedlibrary library even has a supplementary blog, where I dump the drafts and outtakes and rants which I'd prefer to share with a smaller, possibly more interested audience. It's neither public nor private. I don't link to it overtly, but I do link to it. I also maintain an pseudonymous blog that has nothing to do with information and libraries and is more personal and creative. I also keep a LiveJournal.

How long have you been blogging?I started my LiveJournal in June 2002 and the very first version of the explodedlibrary in August 2002.

Why do you blog?
Blogging combines three things which I really enjoy: 1. Reading and finding information; 2. Writing; 3. Mucking around with computers. I would continue blogging in some form even if I knew that nobody else ever read it, because I like doing this stuff. Blogging about things has become a way that I make sense of the world.

What is so special about blogging anyway?
The blogosphere is place of words and ideas. There are still moments when it doesn't matter what you look like, how much or little money you earn, how many degrees you have or how accomplished you might be - the only thing differentiating one blogger from another are their actual words. As such, it has given some people a voice who have never had one before. This situation may change, but while it remains, I am grateful for it.

How often do you update this blog?
I can be fairly erratic with how often I update this blog. It's usually once or twice a week, but it varies a lot. I make no apologies for this. If you subscribe to the blog in your feed reader, this shouldn't be a problem.

What is your policy on comments on this blog?I really like receiving comments, all comments except the ones which are spam, nasty or illegal. I can handle comments strongly disagreeing with me on the issues, but if you cross the line into being mean and insulting, I am not so noble that I'll let those ones through. Unlike many bloggers, I don't have an absolute ban on commercial comments - provided they are relevant to the post and add something to the conversation. In addition, once a post has been around for about six months, I close the commenting.

Why do you moderate commenting on the blog?
Look at it this way. It  is better that you wait a few hours for your comment to appear on my blog, than it goes there right away but is lost forever in the sewage of comment spam. Alternatively, better this delay than there be no commenting or no blog at all because the comment spammers were driving me crazy. Seriously, the drudgery of dealing with comment spam nearly caused me to quit blogging. Comment moderation has been an absolute godsend for me.

Hey - I noticed a typo, a missed word or some other error on your blog
If it's a factual error on a recent post, I definitely want to know about it and I'll make a correction once I've verified what's going on. If it's about a broken link on a post on a post that I wrote 3 years ago, I'm probably not interested. Even if it's a really important post, I'd  rather revisit the area now and than correct what I wrote 3 years ago. I tend to avoid post-publication editing -and when I do it, I have set particular rules for myself. After over a year, these still generally apply, with one significant exception. I reserve the right to break the letter of any of these rules if: it makes life easier for me and my readers and commentors and I'm not violating the spirit of the rules (which is basically not being sneaky about post-publication edits)

What tools do you use for blogging? TypePad for the actual hosted blogging service. Right now I'm reading blogs on the Google Reader.

I'm having a hard time printing this blog. This blog is intended to be viewed online, not printed. If you must print it out, I understand that there are better results with Internet Explorer. Read this post for more on my views about blog printability.

Currently playing in iTunes: The Garden's End by Sarah Blasko

a year in Sydney

At first it was to be temporary thing - I'd move to Sydney, but still keep an eye on the job situation in Tasmania. If something good came up, and if (definitely the more uncertain if, given my experience of unexpectedly brutal job market in Tasmania) I got the job, I'd move back in a heartbeat.

Now I see that my time in Sydney is not so going to be so temporary. I'm likely to be here for at least 3 more years. I'm not going to be looking at jobs in Tasmania anymore. My new job in Sydney is just what I've been looking for, and I have no pipedreams that there might be an equivalent job available in Tasmania which could entice me back. This isn't to put down Tasmania, it's just stating the fact that the way my career has developed, I am most competitive in legal and special library positions - of which there are very few in Tasmania. Although I'd be willing to work in just about any sort of library position, in most situations employers would prefer somebody with a background in their particular sort of library - whether it be public, school, academic science / humanities etc. This hasn't changed.

I can't just breeze into a public library position feeling all superior because of my academic or legal or special library experience, and expect a public library to fall over itself to hire me.

Yes, some specialties are generally paid more than others. Others might be more comfortable places to work - or provide access to more expensive resources/toys or be more intellectually interesting. While others may be rewarding in other ways. How is it possible to quantify the knowledge that one's work is clearly and unambiguously furthering one's goals in politics and social justice? The best or most ideal sub-specialty will vary according to each individual's priorities and situation.

I have made the decision although Tasmania is a beautiful place, and although I miss family and friends who are there, I cannot be sustained by these alone if I am miserable because I am unemployed or underemployed. I'm better off living in Sydney, where I have far superior employment options, and deal with feeling homesick for Tasmania. I can alleviate these symptoms by participating in the annual or bi-annual pilgrimage rites observed by other Gen-X members of the Tasmanian diaspora. I've already booked my trip back to Hobart for the week between Christmas and New Year's Day.

A few words about my current home in Sydney. Sydney gets a very bad rap amongst the rest of Australia. It is viewed as the epitome of the excesses of Australia's urbanization. Most Australians live in cities, and for the majority who don't live in Sydney, it's comforting to think, well at least my place is not as crazy and frantic as Sydney. In some ways it's true. Nowhere else in Australia can you see the extremes and chasms in Australian society than in Sydney, where the beggars and derelict haunt the same streets frequented by the Armani and Prada-clad beautiful and successful people. I've never seen people as hurried and stressed as certain people in Sydney - but having lived here for a year, I understand how people can stress out here. You can't really judge Sydneysiders until you've stood in their shoes and can see what it's like to live here. I've also found people in Sydney refreshingly accepting of people from different places, as many are from other places themselves. After all the negatives, why would any one move to this huge city which seems to be choking its own growth and expensive real estate? The bleak view is that people move to Sydney when their hopes dry up in their original home. But I prefer to think maybe it's that fairy tale notion of moving to the big city to find one's fortune. I vaguely remember Mary Donaldson from my high school, Taroona High. She certainly found her dreams in Sydney.

Currently playing in iTunes: Confessions on a Dancefloor (Non-Stop Mix) by Madonna