Okay, now I’m really getting pretentious. When I started this unnecessary blog, I called it “Academic Librarian,” which I realize is a bit grandiose. I did this mostly because there was already a blog called “Humanities Librarian,” which would have been a natural title for me. (You seem to have given up on that blog, eh Marc!) To compensate, I make the humanities joke in the subtitle. In the Renaissance, the studia humanitatis (or the liberal arts or humanities) were grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history, and moral philosophy, the proper objects of study for a free human being.
But being “Academic Librarian” has its advantages if I can keep up the blog. For example, it comes much higher in an alphabetical list, unless someone calls it “The Academic Librarian,” which really defeats the whole point of the alphabetization. I learned the importance of rising in the list when I hyphenated my name at marriage. I was Tatum, but became Bivens-Tatum, jumping from near the bottom to near the top of alphabetized lists. It’s a lesson in gaming an arbitrary classification system that Weinberger discusses in Everything is Miscellaneous.
Anyway, I have decided to exploit the pretentiousness to it fullest. The other day I was preparing for my latest Google 2.0-type workshop for INFOLINK and was playing around with Google Apps, the application that allows free web hosting and email addresses while making it easy to get a domain name during the signup process. It really is as easy as it claims to be. Within about 10 minutes, I had signed up and acquired the academiclibrarian.net domain. Yesterday I created a homepage with a redirect script, so that http://academiclibrarian.net now leads you to this very blog. rwbtatum@academiclibrarian.net also sends messages to me. Maybe in 10 years I can grow to be the academic equivalent of Jessamyn West’s long-running and useful librarian.net. I considered moving the blog to academiclibrarian.net, but the Princeton IT folks have been so helpful and Movable Type is so easy to use that I didn’t see the point.
So, from now on I can be academiclibrarian.net and reap the rewards of grabbing the name. I don’t know what the rewards will be, but I’m sure they’ll be substantial!
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