Not that we really post enough anyway, but I’m currently visiting over at Information Overlord, helping read through the Booker Prize nominees and waffling at length about books and themes and stuff. My first post is up now, discussing the lovely Secret Scripture.

I haven’t yet blogged about law.librarians, the newest experiment in group blogging from an international crew of law librarians, mostly, I think, because I’ve been spending so much time there!

It’s turning out to be a great community and resouce for everyone involved. Law.librarians is being used to share resources and links, both serious and not-so-serious, as well as becoming a place to ask community opinion on a question, to try and find a resources or just to chat with like-minded people.

As much as I like and enjoy using Twitter, I’m finding the ability to comment, and the better signal-to-noise ratio of law.librarians to be very appealing. If you haven’t gone to check it out yet, do drop by and have a look!

I haven’t had a whole lot of spare time in, well, the last few months or so, and my online reading time has been very much curtailed. Because of this (rather unsurprisingly) I haven’t been reading a lot of blog posts. Particularly, I haven’t been reading almost any library related blog posts – I’d rather have the time to read them properly when I do, so I’ve been putting it off. Trying to trudge through this backlog of posts has made me think about how I read blog posts, and what makes me read a post when I’m short on time. And so (and because I don’t have time to write a real post – soon, I promise!), I present my top three things that will make me read your blog post when I’m short on time.

1. Give good head(line)

I read my feeds using Google Reader, and I have it set to show me just the headlines. If I don’t have a good idea of what you’re going to be talking about in your post from the headline, chances are I’m just going to skip it. I want to know if it’s a review or a short link or something not really relevant at all, and I want to know it without clicking through to the whole text (this is particularly true if you’re posting conference notes – there’s almost nothing more uninteresting to me than conference notes, unless it’s real-time conference notes, which are even worse).

2. Name your blog well

I have my feeds listed alphabetically, and I expect most people do too. It’s lazy, but it works. And chances are, if your blog starts with the letter T or below, by the time I get down there I probably have done all the reading I want to. The library community repeats itself a lot (hell, the blogosphere repeats itself a lot – it’s how the whole thing works), so if I’m reading en masse, I’ve probably covered most of the major recent issues by the time I get about half way down the list.

3. Don’t update too often

Whilst there’s something to be said for posting a lot, if I look at a feed that I haven’t looked at in a week or so, and it has double-digits of unread posts in, I’m probably just going to mark them all as read. Or at least not skim them very hard. Marking all as read goes double if you fill out your feed with useless things that I don’t want to read (I’m primarily thinking Twitter and del.icio.us updates here) – if I want to follow what you’re doing on other services, I’ll follow you there. Put the links in your sidebar and don’t bother me with them again.

Ok, ok, so these are all pretty self-explanatory, and mostly just go to show that I have too many feeds to read (a perennial problem of mine), and that I need a better way to manage my information flows (I’ve been playing a bit with Dapper lately – any thoughts on it?). I’d like to hear other thoughts though – what makes you stop in your tracks and not read something? Or what always will make you click into a post?

I’ve been filled with a terrible ennui for the last few weeks, not just for blogging, but for pretty much everything work related. It’s been really frustrating me – I don’t like to be apathetic and grumpy about work all the time – and I couldn’t work out what was up. And then I thought about it a bit more, and realised that not only is it the end of the year, but I’ve also been at MPOW for a year now. It’s not the biggest milestone ever, but it’s enough that it’s been causing me to look back on the year and dwell on all the things I hadn’t achieved. Which is completely the wrong way to go about it.

So, in an attempt to spruce up my spirts, and try and get some perspective on the past year, I’ve been thinking about about what I’ve achieved this year, and what I’m thankful for (too late for Thanksgiving, I know, but as I don’t celebrate it anyway, I figure that any time is a good time to remember to be thankful).

This has been a good year for me – I have a lot to be proud of. I’ve achieved things that I didn’t think I would have, I started writing this blog, I’ve done awesome things at my work and for my career that I’m really happy about, I’ve learned things and changed things and been happy, and all in all I don’t really have very much to complain about.

Despite this, it’s really hard for me not to hit that wall at the end of the year though. It’s just in my nature. And it seems to be the time where everyone becomes frustrated and disgruntled, looking for changes that just haven’t happened. I’m trying to keep the good things in front of me, but it’s very hard not to focus on all of the things that I haven’t achieved, that haven’t been done yet, and that don’t look set to change anytime soon.

So how to keep my head above the water? Well, I’ve been reading lots of great and inspirational blogs – not library blogs, but career oriented blogs, mostly aimed at millennials/gen-y workers and the angst associated with it (a bit self-indulgent, I know, but educational and motivating at the same time). I’d recommend Modite, Employee Evolution, and Brazen Careerist (even when I want to yell at her for being difficult) as gen-y aimed blogs that help keep me focused on my goals, whilst also helping me be oriented as a young but (relatively) ambitious worker in an industry that it’s (relatively) difficult to be ambitious in. And blogs like Web Worker Daily, and ProBlogger Daily help my motivation to blog and be proactive – I don’t really want to blog as a career, but they make it sound so appealing! Surrounding myself with these positive examples really does help, even though it doesn’t seem like it some days.

How about you all? This time of year get you down? Any tips to share on beating that mid-winter, year-end ennui?

Or, how I learned to stop worrying and embrace the fact that I’m an info-floozy

Fiona Bradley posting at Libraries Interact has a good post about cutting down on information overload, which brought in mind to me the draft post I’ve had sitting on my desktop for, oh, the last few months.

See, I have a problem with information overload. A real bad, no good, terrible problem. Now, I’ll happily be the first one to admit it. I love information – thrive off it – and the wonderful glut of information available in these heady days of web 2.0 is a godsend to me. I’ll happily lap up all of that wonderful zeitgeist coming at me through the interwebs at the moment. But I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t taking it’s toll. And I know that it’s taking it’s toll on a lot of you too.

But what to do about it?

Google Reader tells me that, as of this moment, I’m subscribed to 540 blogs. Now, I know what you’re thinking (I can hear the horrified gasps from here). And it is, I know. I struggle with trying to keep up with them, and manage somewhere between not too badly, and appallingly, depending on how much time I have on my hands. Now, I don’t read all of them everyday (I couldn’t possibly), and a lot of them update irregularly, or are dead (it’s such a hassle weeding out things like that, and I really can’t be bothered – it’s not a problem having them there if they don’t update and don’t get in my way). And I do read in a lot of different subject areas – my main folders cover libraries (2 folders of those), cooking (more than I care to mention), comics, web stuff, geekery, tech, law, KM, productivity, career stuff, music, shopping, people, job hunting, and a temp folder for things that I think I want to delete, but haven’t quite summoned up the courage to actually delete yet. And I know this is too much. Everyday I look at it and pale at the sight of so many unread items. It’s a daunting prospect.

But then again, so is the idea of deleting them. As I said, I’m a sucker for information, and this is feeding my habit. I know I don’t really need to know all of these things, but oh! they’re so good to know! I get to read about beautiful new things, exciting new projects, risque politics, shiny new games, and lots of yummy things to make, lots of music to listen to, and… I don’t want to be without them. I love being on the crest of the wave. I love knowing what will be coming out soon, what the new trends are, what the new tools and startups are. And I love hearing what people are saying about them – what everyone of the individual people in my reading list is saying.

And yet, I do need to cut back. And I have.

There are a lot of ways to cope with information overload like this – Fiona points out a few goods tips in her post, mostly relying on the idea of cutting shamelessly and ruthlessly and not stopping until you have the number of feeds you’re subscribed to down to a manageable number. Which is all well and good, and definitely a good start, but I have a few points to add:

• Think about how you read your blogs – I don’t mind being subbed into a large number of cooking blogs and webcomics, cause essentially they’re just a greatbig scroll of pretty pictures. These blogs bring me joy and give me a way of relaxing. Reading blogs doesn’t just have to be about work and information – it can be about getting small bits of happy sent straight to your feedreader
• Think about when you read – using the same example, as much as I love my sprawling mass of pretty pictures, it’s not mission critical if I don’t read them, or ifI only look at them a few times a week. And as long as you don’t feel compelled to read things that you don’t have time to read, then it’s not really a problem
• Think about what you’d lose if you unsubscribe – This is a bit of a two-edged sword – think about what you’ll be losing both in the good and bad context. One good post a month probably isn’t worth ten bad ones, but at the same time, if someone is only posting once a month, but it’s an amazing post, it’s probably a keeper
• Don’t think you have to unsubscribe to get it under control. If nothing else, I use my reader as an ersatz bookmarking service (as much as I love del.icio.us, things get lost there and are never seen again). Rather than unsubscribing straight away, I move subscriptions to my interim folder, and graze through it every now and then, to see what’s in there. I wouldn’t have subscribed to them in the first place if they weren’t interesting enough to keep an eye on, but you don’t have to be looking at them every day.
• And, as a last ditch, but awfully effective method, just stop reading. Just don’t do it. Don’t open your reader. When you do, don’t be afraid to mark whole folders’as read’ before you even take a peek. Have a folder for the most vitally important, must read, top ten or twenty feeds in your list, and only look at those. (This is my strategy at the moment – I just don’t have the time to be reading as much as I used to, and as such, I only read a tiny percentage of what I’m subbed to)

It’s very easy to get overwhelmed by the amount of information available and think that you can’t escape from the mire of interesting and terribly important things that need reading. It is possible to get it under control though. Does anyone else have any tried and tested methods for keeping their subscriptions under control?

So. We’ve been planning this for a while, but it’s taken a while to get sorted. We have decided to relaunch the site – pack up our things and move to wordpress, our own shiny new domain and out of the mire of pseudonymous blogging, and start writing as ourselves at the all new and improved Enquiring Minds Want to Know.

Please feel free to peruse our new about us page that will give you some insight into the crazy minds behind this whole shindig.

It would be wonderful if you could all click on the link below to resubscribe to the new feed, or go here to check it out first, and tell us what you think of the redesign. There is also, should you be so inclined, a new link to subscribe by email, if you’re into that kind of thing (check out the sidebar).

We will be running both blogs simultaneously for a while to give everyone a chance to move over – however, the old feed will be littered with notices reminding you to change your subscription or update your bookmarks, so it might be best just to do it straight away and save yourself the hassle :)

Recently Librarian in Black had an interesting post regarding honesty and blogging about work. She came to the conclusion that there was no happy medium – honest blogging is both career suicide and honest sharing at the same time. And I rather agree with her.

This isn’t an issue we talk about a lot, but it has been coming up more and more recently. There has been some critique of the bibiloblogosphere, saying that we’re not critical enough, and that we don’t deal enough with contentious issues. There isn’t enough dissent and there isn’t enough discussion of what actually goes on in the workplace. And I think that this is an interesting issue to address.

I can’t help but think that this is (or should be) more of an issue with library blogs – we are, inherently blogging about work (you may be a librarian by vocation, but it is still ultimately a job), but everyone is still too scared to talk about the specifics of what we do. There is, as LiB said, too much of a fear of reprisal. It is, however, this fear of reprisal (and the reprisal itself) that I find disappointing and strange.

We’re not, by and large, a cantankerous or troll-y bunch. I can count the kerfuffles I’ve seen in the bibiloblogosphere nearly on one hand, nothing like the average of most internet communities (and even when there are slight dramas, they are very rarely on the scale of internet warfare seen elsewhere). We’re not likely to say things that are massively detrimental to the workplaces in which we work, or the people whom we work with. At worst, I expect we may be slightly snarky, and there may be a slight workplace politics hiccup following a potentially ‘difficult’ post, if there were any at all. And, essentially, we are librarians blogging for other librarians. Where we work within institutions, our non-library colleagues are very unlikely to see what we have written, even if we are well known within the library-blogging fold. And our library colleagues and peers are likely to be sympathetic to the workplace troubles and frustrations that we all share.

But, sadly, our workplaces tend to be unsupportive of this honesty and sharing. It is uncomfortable, and unfamiliar, and they don’t know what to do with it. They may approve of, or at least accept, blogging as an academic medium, in which we can wax lyrical about the state of the information profession, and where the industry may be heading, or as a forum for letting more interested people find out about interesting new tools and services. But they are uncomfortable with what I think of as business casual – the ability to be professional, and take your work seriously, whilst still being a separate person, with ideas and opinions that may not always align with what is best for the company. I see my role in this blog as a business casual role – this is something I do for myself; I love the reading, writing, and conversations that I get to participate in from being part of it, and I would be (and was) blogging in some other capacity if I didn’t have this blog. But this is also a professional venture – this is a way of meeting other professionals in my field, expanding on my knowledge of the sector, improving my skills, and, ultimately, being better at my job, and any future jobs I will hold.

It is this business casual idea that makes me understand why in other professions it doesn’t put you at a disadvantage to have a blog. In industries where it’s ok to wear business casual to work, it’s probably ok to be writing business casual as well – think advertising, design, consultancy, and other types of web work and bleeding-edge millenium industries.

And this is where I think the frustration lies. We are web-workers – we are sharing in the zeitgeist of new technology. We know what the most engaged minds of our generation are thinking and doing. We are using the tools that they are using, and sharing the thoughts that they are thinking. We engage in the same communities, and participate in the same practices. But we are not them. They work from without, while we work from within. They work in industries where free-thinking and opinions and open-ness are valued, whilst we still, by and large, work within large dinosaurs of organisations, unable to keep up with the changes, even when they would like to.

I can’t help but think that it’s somewhat unreasonable to expect bloggers to never hold, or at least express, a negative opinion about their workplace, but would indeed, if I were employer, rather than employee, relish and appreciate the honesty and personality of my employees being able to express such an opinion. But, at the same time, I know that it’s hard for our lumbering dinosaurs of organisations to keep up with the nimble leaps and jumps that modern webworkers make.

And I don’t know what the answer to this is. If we challenge the system we will get knocked back (note: my shocking absence on Twitter and Facebook during the working day at the moment). But if we don’t challenge the system we won’t change anything. Personally, I believe in pushing the rules as far as they will let me go and to hell with the consquences! What do you think?

Last week Fiona Bradley asked what I thought was a very pertinent question on Twitter – where are all the blogging UK librarians?

Since moving from Australia in 2006, I have seen the Australian library blogger population flourish, with many exciting bloggers and events. There has been the West Australia Lib 2.0 Unconference, Information Online 2007, and New Librarian 2006.

There is the upcoming State Library of Queensland Unconference, Australian Blogging Conference, Information Online 2009, VALA 2008 and IFLA 2010 has been announced for Brisbane (all of which I would love to be able to attend! why did I move to the UK again?)

There are wonderful blogs such as the aforementioned Blisspix, Kathryn Greenhill, Exploded Library and Connecting Librarian, amongst others.

(I focus on Australia, because obviously the US contingent has been kicking it hardcore for a very long while *g*)

But here in the UK, there is not so much…

There are the few of us legal library bloggers (all, you know, six or seven of us). And there’s Phil Bradley and Karen Blakeman. And quite a few universities and public libraries have institutional blogs. And whilst institutional blogs are both great and very important, they’re not quite the same as personal library blogs. They cover different issues and are not, generally, so much a place for discussion and community.

Where is the discussion, the barcamps, the unconferences, the passion? There’s Internet Librarian 2007, but quite frankly, the program is just not that exciting, dealing with a lot of issues that are a bit, well, 2005 (e-learning, portals and wikis at work, virtual libraries – these are not new and challenging concepts). I envy all of you Australian and US bloggers, with your exciting conferences to attend and projects to get involved in. It just doesn’t seem to have caught on here yet, and I’m not sure why. Are we too caught up in tradition and the old ways of doing things? Too resistant to change? Too scared to make a fuss or get into trouble for blogging our opinions? I’m not sure…

Or maybe I’m wrong, maybe there are lots of UK library blogs and events going on that I just can’t seem to find. Some secret underground community of subversive UK librarians, maybe? (and if there are, please let me know!)

Meredith Farkas has put up some preliminary results of her Biblioblogosphere Survey, and there’s some interesting stuff there.

The figures for the percentage of bloggers being academic v public are interesting as it makes me wonder what the other 37% do.

2. Back in 2005, only 19% of bloggers were public librarians while 44% were academic librarians. In 2007, that gap is closing. Now, 33.6% of all library bloggers work in academic libraries and 29.3% are public librarians.

Also, this quote made me smile:

6. Want to be happy? Well, you may want to become a school librarian, work in a law library or work for a consortium or library system, because those three got the highest scores for job satisfaction.

I’m definitely looking forward to seeing the final results of the survey!

Meridith Farkas of Information Wants To Be Free, and Social Software in Libraries, is conducting another survey of the biblioblogosphere (the results from the 2005 survey are here), which you can participate in here. I think the results will give interesting insight into the biblioblogosphere and the way that it has been changing and growing. It’ll be nice to have a bit more of a presence from UK and legal library bloggers as well – I think we’ve grown a lot in the last year, and it would be good to see how much.

Go forth and participate!