July 2008 Archives

I wanted to write this yesterday, when the death itself occurred, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. The grief was too strong. I arrived at work to an email from a friend, with the simple subject line “AAAARRRRGGGGHHHH.” At first, there was the denial. This can’t really be happening. I couldn’t believe it, despite the evidence. I tried and tried, but the death reports were true. Then came the anger. Anger! And I knew I wasn’t alone. Many of us were angry. Then, of course, the bargaining. Just one more day, please, pretty please, just let me make it through the week! The depression quickly followed. That’s why I couldn’t write about this yesterday. I couldn’t see the screen through the tears. Finally, the acceptance. I wasn’t at peace with the world, but I finally realized there was nothing I could do, and just had to accept it. So I gave up on Scrabulous and added the Scrabble Beta application to Facebook.

It doesn’t work well. In fact, it doesn’t even work. It teased me by letting me start a game, but then went down. I suspect Hasbro created this dysfunctional app so they could argue that Scrabulous was competing with them on Facebook. So they put up this flashy junk that doesn’t work. As of this writing, they have an error message. They’ll be up again, someday! They claim they’re working on streamlining their crappy app for their “official release” in mid-August. Sure.

The most painful part of the message is the final part: “Please continue to let us know how we can make Scrabble - the best word game on Facebook - even better!

- The Scrabble Team”

What suggestions could we have, when we know that Scrabulous was the best word game on Facebook? Are we really to trust the “Scrabble Team,” the team that helped destroy the object of our affection that helped give us pleasure during so many lonely hours? I don’t think so.

But there’s nothing I can do about that, either. I must learn acceptance. I won’t get to finish those games I was playing, the only consolation being that I was losing two of them. My best bingo (SPeLLING for 158 points) will no longer be on record. That’s just the way it is, I guess. Sometimes the good die young.

Goodbye, old friend.

Like many of you, I’ve been reading about Cuil, the new search engine from some former Google employees. I tried a couple of searches, but so far I don’t see why I would use this much. I searched “academic librarian,” for example. Of the eleven hits on the first page, four were to this blog. It’s nice to know I have such “authority,” but I thought four was about three too many. Three of the four hits had pictures of people beside them. I have no idea who the people are, but they’re definitely not me. I also searched “bivens-tatum.” The hits are all relevant, and there’s a nice spread, but again the pictures have nothing to do with me. There’s a picture of some painting by the link to this blog, but this blog doesn’t have any images. Perhaps the image comes from somewhere on the Princeton server. If the top left hit is the most relevant, then apparently a Shakespeare authorship website I made in library school is the most relevant web page related to me. Maybe they know it’s the first web page I ever created, so it has a certain sentimental value.

The layout is presumably to prevent the need to scroll, but I would like an option in the preferences to have more hits on the first page. When I’m looking for information, I want more text, rather than a tastefully arranged page with images scattered across like knick-knacks. I might like the search results better if I wasn’t ego-cuiling, but I don’t think I’d like the layout.

Anyway, there’s my two cents.

In the humanities, we shouldn’t have to write budget reports. The library should just give us money to spend.

If our salaries were related to our budgets, those science librarians would make a ton of money. Instead of being related to something rational, like height, our salaries seem to be related to some sort of market.

If Europeans want us to buy more books, they really should do something about that euro. That thing has gone up 78% against the dollar since I started this job. One begins to think, hmm, if there’s any philosophy in French or German worth getting, it’d probably be translated and published in America. Right?

Not that I’m much of a one for nostalgia anyway, but I definitely wouldn’t have wanted to be a librarian before Excel.

Procrastination: Complete.

Gloom, like sex, sells, though it’s odd anyone would want to buy it considering that, also like sex, there’s so much of it freely available on the Internet. There’s certainly enough to be gloomy about: a pointless war, mortgage foreclosures, job losses, rich people in New York selling their spare diamonds to make ends meet. Times are hard.

They could get worse, too, if the current generation of students is as bad as some claim. I haven’t read Mark Bauerlein’s new book The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future, though I remember reading this article from the Chronicle of Higher Education a couple of years ago that’s obviously building up to the book. From the reviews, it sounds like a depressing read, and I gather from the title the problem is with the digital age. Perhaps it’s not just a problem with these kids today, though. Maybe the digital age is making us all stupid, as Nicholas Carr opines in the Atlantic. Maybe we’re turning (have turned?) into a culture of distracted skimmers without the attention necessary to read a book anymore. Perhaps channel-(or web) surfing is an accurate metaphor for our mental lives these days. Is it just our students who come to college as ignorant mouthbreathers panting for the next Facebook status update, or are we all like this now? It seems every week I read yet another article on how stupid we’re all becoming because we revel in distraction. Some naysayers go so far as to point a critical finger at blogs. (Disclaimer: you are now reading a blog. Blogs may be hazardous to your mind. Read at you’re own peril!)

Things may really be as bad as they seem, but somehow I can’t share in the gloom about the kids today, no matter how few of them can identify the Speaker of the House or how many of them know more about American Idol than Nathaniel Hawthorne. I might be more gloomy if I couldn’t remember the state of my own self when I was eighteen. It pains me now to think how woefully ignorant I was, how few books I’d read, how little I knew about all the subjects that I now love knowing about. Wait, no it doesn’t. This occurs to me because I have a birthday this week (don’t bother with presents, just send cash). If turning eighteen is the beginning of adulthood, I have been an adult for almost twenty-one years now.

How ignorant that eighteen-year-old was about all the subjects we claim are important! Perhaps most critics of the younger generation were always brilliant, erudite high achievers, even when young, like some of the wunderkind I see coming to Princeton. Not me. “Underachieving” was a label frequently applied to my meager efforts in school. Though now I have two college degrees in English literature, I’m not sure I ever managed to finish a book I was assigned to read in high school, and I vaguely remember sleeping through a number of my English classes. (My high school English teacher recently befriended me on Facebook, and I’m sure she’d be able to verify my scholastic inadequacies.) I was a lackadaisical student with little interest in learning what all my no doubt well intentioned teachers thought I should be learning. I wasn’t letting my schooling get in the way of my education.

My teachers seemed to like me for the most part, though, so I guess they didn’t take it personally. Well, except for that geography teacher I used to openly mock because of her incompetence. She didn’t like me very much and even had the nerve to call my parents and complain that I wasn’t taking her class seriously, as evidenced by the fact that I’d filled in deliberately fake answers on a quiz. (Trees that lose their leaves are not deciduous, for example, they are merely careless.) Also, I just remembered, the principal considered me a discipline problem because I frequently ignored the school dress code and kept my shirt untucked. Ahh, the simpler pre-Columbine days.

Certainly I learned things, and I read a lot. Though there weren’t many books in my house, I spent hours at the public library. I consumed books and articles on architecture, photography, and blues music, for example, because after a couple of years of photography and journalism classes in high school, I wanted to be a photojournalist. No, wait, after a couple of years of drafting class I wanted to be an architect. I’m sorry, I meant that I really wanted to be Eric Clapton, and I even have a black and white Strat just like he had back in the day. I probably couldn’t have told you who the Speaker of the House was in 1987. Tip O’Neill, perhaps? I could Google it to make sure. And politics? Why would anyone be interested in politics when there was so much architecture and photography around? And if you can play the blues, does it really matter if you can’t name the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court?

Oh, and television. I watched a ton of it. I’ve watched almost no commercial television since I turned eighteen, but that’s because I’d consumed a lifetime’s supply by then. I planned my life around Thursday nights on NBC. I wanted to go drinking at Cheers and then end up in Night Court, because I had crushes on both Shelley Long and Markie Post. I remember endless childhood Sunday afternoons watching old westerns on KXTX. We got cable TV when I was about six, and it was my friend and boon companion until I graduated from high school and gave up the habit.

And when I wasn’t blowing off my schoolwork, playing guitar, taking photos, or watching television, I was out with friends: going to parties, drinking, hanging out at the mall. It’s hard to believe that there were times when I and my friends had whole weekends with nothing “better” to do than sit around at someone’s house chatting and watching videos. Why wasn’t I reading the politics section of the newspaper? Why wasn’t I informing myself about the world? Why wasn’t I being a good, concerned citizen and steeping myself in my culture? Huh! I ask you that!

Despite all this, I seem to have come out okay, or at least I think so. The child is not always father of the man, it seems. I made it through college and two graduate programs with excellent grades. I’ve got a pretty good job, a loving family, a decent house. Despite almost completely ignoring my studies until college, I’m what most people would probably consider well read. I keep up on current events. I have a smartphone, an iPod, a laptop, and a blog, I email and IM and text message, but somehow I still manage to read a book or two a week on average. I’m now more than twice the age of our incoming college students, yet I don’t feel particularly old. I know almost nothing about contemporary youth culture and I certainly wouldn’t celebrate it, but I can’t bring myself to fault teenagers for doing the things kids do.

Perhaps all of us really are getting stupider, and this blog post is longer than most of us can read. Somehow, I just can’t get that concerned about it. I suppose I should be concerned as a citizen in a democracy, but I’m not convinced our politics are particularly democratic now, so a higher percentage of ignoramuses in a generation probably won’t have much of an effect. It might be that culture is always carried on by a remnant, and there are always bright and passionate people in every generation who manage to carry on and contribute to our knowledge of the world despite the odds.

A friend of mine mentioned he’d seen a recent clip of Roger Daltrey (now in his mid-sixties) singing “My Generation.” We saw him sing it live during The Who’s twenty-fifth reunion tour in 1989, and it seemed to me that he was old then, though he was just a few years older than I am now. It might seem ironic, his singing “I hope I die before I get old,” but maybe it depends on what it means to be old. Are we old when we can no longer understand these kids today? When we think it’s like they’re from another planet, as I recently heard a librarian say? Are we old when we judge the inadequacies of college students by our matured standards? When we no longer remember what unformed youths most of us were? When we actually believe that it’s more important for a teenager to know who the Speaker of the House is than to know the latest television shows? If that’s the case, I don’t want to get old.

Over the weekend I was reading Knowledge Goes Pop, by Clare Birchall. It’s a cultural studies book on what the author calls “popular knowledge,” the sort of knowledge embodied in gossip and conspiracy theories, and uses a Foucauldian / poststructuralist apparatus to analyze this knowledge and its relation to truth, or what the author would call “legitimate” knowledge (scare quotes, of course). She also considers its relation to cultural studies itself, which makes a lot of sense. After all, cultural studies as a field of inquiry often shares a point of view with conspiracy theories, especially the belief that everything is connected and nothing is what it seems to be. Structurally, is there much difference between the conspiracy theorist arguing that the US government deliberately destroyed the World Trade Center and the academic arguing that all of us (excepting the few academics who agree with the author) are all complicit in some dominant political ideology that we don’t understand but which nevertheless manipulates us?

So far I like the book, though it manifests the typical ideological conformity of most cultural studies writing I’ve read. Anything “marginalized,” “subversive,” “radical,” “disruptive,” or “resistant” is good and worthy of our attention; anything “legitimate” or “official” suspect. It’s not that I mind; it’s just that the attitude of such politicized scholarship is so predictable in its assumption that things are marginalized because of some reason other than they’re stupid or useless, as if marginal were in itself interesting and subversive always beneficial, regardless of what is being subverted. This sentence sums up a lot of that attitude: “There is a risk that the aestheticization of conspiracy theory only serves to depolitize any challenging or radical potential it might have (we could, however, think this is a good thing in relation to right wing Militia groups)” (41). I’m happy to take that risk.

However, while reading it I decided to do a bit more research on some conspiracy theories. As I’ve written before, conspiracy theories are a minor hobby of mine. I find them fascinating as objects of study. In particular I was going to follow up on my favorite conspiracy theorist, David Icke. He’s the one who claims that many world leaders are actually half human / half alien reptiles that allow them to shape-shift and pose as humans as they implement the fascistic new world order on behalf of the Illuminati. Needless to say, he’s a lot of fun. He’s also a dynamic and amusing speaker. Search Google Video for — david icke freedom fascism — to see a six hour presentation of his on conspiracies. As an example of his style, in the second video of three he criticizes Bush for continuing to read a children’s book about a pet goat after Andrew Card has informed him that a second plane had hit the World Trade Center. “Okay, Andy. After I find out what happens to this goat, I’ll be right out.”

Icke’s written a lot of books on his conspiracy theories, but the latest one seems to sum up his past books, so I thought it would be a good place to start: The David Icke Guide to the Global Conspiracy (and How to End It). I don’t know why I found it surprising, but according to Worldcat, of the 45 copies in American libraries, none are owned by academic libraries. Based on a very cursory glance through the holdings list on several other of his books, that’s for the most part true of his other books as well. Here and there an academic library may have one of the books, but almost all of them are held by public libraries, which means that eventually almost all of them will be weeded when they have passed their popularity date.

The question for research libraries is, does this matter? These books are part of what Birchall calls “popular knowledge.” They are decidedly not part of what we would call scholarly knowledge, which is typically what we buy. It’s obvious to me why few academic libraries ever buy these books. They’re books by kooks, right? We don’t buy those. We librarians act as filters to keep them out of our scholarly collections, and the scholars apparently agree with our decisions, because they’re not clamoring for more books by David Icke or other conspiracy theorists. There are few scholarly books on these kinds of theories, after all. Why would anyone want to study this intellectual gibberish?

The obvious argument against such collections is that scholars don’t take these things seriously. We tend not to have major research collections on astrology or self-help, either, because the unserious and intellectually suspect nature of these books makes them unimportant as contributions to the scholarly record, yet at the same time the books pose as argumentative non-fiction, which is one way to describe scholarly books. Conspiracy books are in many ways like scholarly books. They consider evidence. They make arguments. Only they tend to do it badly and are often unverifiable. Still, we collect other books that pose unverifiable theories about the world, especially in the humanities. Are most of the assertions of French theory any more verifiable than those made by the 9/11 Truth Movement?

However, we collect non-scholarly works as objects of study as a matter of course. Novels, letters, diaries, films. Why don’t we also collect conspiracy books in the same spirit? Perhaps it’s because of the pseudo-scholarly nature of most of these books. Novels rarely pose as fact. Films don’t claim to be true. David Icke presumably believes what he writes is true, and so do a lot of other people. Because of this pseudo-scholarly nature, perhaps the scholarly consensus to ignore these works makes more sense. Conspiracy books aren’t proper objects of scholarly study because they compete with scholarly study. Taking them seriously even as objects of study would give them some sort of interest, would perhaps validate them in some way. Is this why we don’t collect these things?

Are we the filters that guard scholarly knowledge, or even “legitimate” knowledge? Or is the truth darker? Perhaps academic librarians are part of the fortress guarding scholarly standards of knowledge, or perhaps instead we are all victims of false consciousness or even part of the conspiracy. Is this active non-collection or merely neglect? Are we repressing or merely ignoring conspiracy books? Do we not buy these books because we don’t want them widely distributed, thus “marginalizing” them? Or is it that we don’t want the theories to survive for later study, because we don’t want people to know the truth?

It could be the absence of conspiracy collections in most research libraries is the result of benign neglect, but maybe, just maybe, something else is going on. We could be either reactionary dupes marginalizing the subversive radicals among us, or tools of the Illuminati doing our best to suppress the disruptive truth about the conspiracy to establish the new world order. Either way it doesn’t look pretty for us. We may look like ordinary librarians widely dispersed doing out best to collect works of scholarship and objects of scholarly interest, but it might be naive to believe this, because it could be that everything is connected and nothing is what it seems.

I attended another program at ALA, the RUSA President’s Program, which was called “Quality Service in an Impersonal World” (if I remember correctly). That’s the program that began with several librarians singing a song called “R-U-S-A” to the tune of The Village People’s “Y-M-C-A,” though they weren’t dressed as colorfully at The Village People. Regarding the song, let’s just say that it was very long.

The first speaker was Robert Spector, author of The Nordstrom Way, which apparently has something to do with the great customer service at Nordstrom’s. Having never shopped at Nordstrom’s that didn’t mean much to me. However, the guy was definitely a great speaker, which is always a pleasure to find at these conferences. Personally, I’ve never found anything insightful in “customer service” talk that isn’t already contained in Kant’s categorical imperative, and Spector more or less agrees, it seems, since he said something like, all this is just the Golden Rule applied to sales. The impression I got from the whole program was that we’re all supposed to think it’s about the services. Everything is about good customer service, and it’s the people who make up the organization that really count.

I sat with an old friend during the program, someone who also works at a private university with a large research library. When discussing the program later, we both agreed that this all-about-the-service-and-the-people ethic wasn’t necessarily the case at our libraries. Instead, the collections are the important thing. Certainly, there have to be people to acquire, catalog, and preserve the collections. Naturally, we also have people who instruct library users how to find what they need, which is where the “customer service” part would come in. But even without these people, and I’m one of them, the center would still be the collection.

Scholars don’t necessarily want people; they want stuff. They want books, journals, archives, manuscripts, data, and if the library has the stuff they’ll use the library regardless of the people. I’ve heard various stories about inhospitable research libraries, especially in Europe, that seem to make it as difficult as possible for scholars to get at their resources, but scholars go even to these libraries because they want the stuff. I’m not saying having a lot of desired resources means we should act like that librarian in The Name of the Rose or that we shouldn’t be helpful and friendly. I’m just saying that for large libraries, the collection takes precedence in a way that it doesn’t elsewhere, and that the service-is-everything attitude doesn’t seem as prominent.

I know this isn’t the case in smaller libraries. I worked for a couple of years in a liberal arts college library, which was probably adequate for most undergraduates, but definitely wasn’t designed to support scholarly research at too high a level. The library usually didn’t even have the books I wanted to read, for that matter. In smaller places, that’s what ILL is for, but for ILL to work, the desired articles actually have to be somewhere. From the way some librarians speak, ILL means libraries can stop buying a lot of stuff, but for a resource to be shared, some library has to purchase it in the first place. There have to be just-in-case libraries for the just-in-time approach to work at other ones. No library has everything, of course, but some libraries must have a lot for the system to work.

It seems that most of what I read about customer service comes from public librarians, who want to attract as many people as possible in libraries with relatively small collections. In fact, another interesting speaker in the program was a public librarian who talked about a service her library provides, where librarians greet patrons at the door and walk them through the library helping them find what they need. I think I’d find that a bit too much if I were the patron, but then again I’m already a librarian. I’m sure there are plenty of library users who really like this program, and it sounded like a good way to get out of the reference desk mentality, where the librarians sit and wait while fewer patrons come to seek them out. I’m all for a service mentality in research libraries as well, but still I think it’s important to remember that in research libraries, collection development is a customer service.

I now declare to the world that I don’t want to hear any more librarians try to tell me that college students today are so vastly different from normal human beings that no one can communicate with them. Since when did adults become such anxious ninnies about college students? I hate to make generational generalizations, but is it a boomer thing? Were they obsessed with their self-proclaimed specialness as youths and are now obsessed with their children? Or is it librarians who themselves feel out of touch who then tell the rest of us that we’re the ones out of touch?

Recently I heard from a librarian that it was as if college students today were from another planet and that they knew much more about all this techie stuff than anyone in the room. Um, sure. Speak for yourself, buddy.

The straw that broke this camel’s back was at ALA. Normally I’m in so many committee meetings or discussion groups that I don’t get to many programs, but I had an unexpectedly free slot and went to a program on “speaking the language of the millennials.” I went, thinking I might learn something and might also get at least a blog post out of it. Besides, I knew one of the speakers.

It started with one of the organizers reading from the Beloit College Mindset List. Though this list might raise a chuckle, it’s hardly a piece of keen sociological analysis. We were told that these kids today don’t remember the Berlin Wall and that Michael Moore has always been around and apparently the Beloit College people think he’s funny. I just took a quick look through the list, and, in the letters of my generation, BFD.

Were college professors and librarians such anxious ninnies when I started college? Did they have lists like the following: The class of 1991 doesn’t remember where it was at when Kennedy was shot. Either one! It doesn’t remember the Civil Rights Act, the moon landing, the Watts riots, the Stonewall riots, the Summer of Love, Woodstock, or the Vietnam War. There have always been The Pill and calculators. For them, cut and paste is a metaphor, and they write their essays on computers! Steve Martin has always been a wild and crazy guy. By the time they graduate, more time will have passed between then and Happy Days than between Happy Days and the era it depicted. How are we ever to communicate with these kids? I don’t remember anything like that.

It was with the first speaker that I knew I was in the wrong demographic for this talk. He started with a list of eight questions. I can’t remember them all (mind slipping in my old age, I guess), but I think they were: How many of you have a cell phone? Use IM and/or text messaging? Have a digital camera? Post photos to Flickr or something similar? Watch Youtube? Post videos to Youtube? Have a Facebook/Myspace profile? And something else I don’t remember. Almost everyone raised a hand at almost every question. Even me. An entire audience of tuned in, plugged in, socially networking, socially softwaring librarians coming apparently just to make sure they weren’t missing anything, anxious to learn how to speak like these millennial people. The speaker seemed taken aback. He paused for a moment, then said “Oh. Then you’re a lot like the college students I see coming in every year.” So much for difference. The first slide, and first statement after the questions, was something like, “the Internet is an important tool for modern communication.” At that point I walked out. I just couldn’t take it anymore.

I work with new college students every year. I teach them in class, I see them in instruction sessions, I meet with them in my office. Somehow I never seem to have any problem communicating with them or speaking a language they can understand. Where I work the language of the millennials is English (for the most part). Is that not the case elsewhere in the country? Yet we librarians are bombarded with claims that these students are so vastly different from “us” that we need to learn some special language to reach them, or that they’re so much more tech-savvy than we benighted librarians. It’s come to the point where I’m not sure whether to believe them or my lying eyes.

You may not be aware of this, but you’ve been reading an experiment. It might not have felt like an experiment, but it was. A year ago this week I started writing this blog as an experiment. A year in I’m trying to figure out just what I think I’ve been doing.

I’d been reading a number of library blogs for a couple of years, and had considered one of my own, but I wasn’t sure what I would write about or whether I could sustain it. Though I work in a library, and read and think about libraries, I never wrote much about libraries or librarianship until I started this blog, so I wasn’t sure I’d have much to say. Writing itself wasn’t a problem, because I write every day and find writing itself to be therapeutic, but writing just about libraries seemed like it might be tough. My goal was to write a solid, readable library blog that discussed issues in academic librarianship and higher education more generally. Up to a point, I think I’ve succeeded. Even if I haven’t, this somewhat atypical library blog seems to have about 300 regular readers and a bit more occasional readers after a year. That probably doesn’t sound like much, but it pleased me, and I thank you all for reading.

Before I began, I asked some other bloggers for advice. One told me he thought there might be a niche for a library blogger who wrote about the sort of issues I write about. Another blogger who chooses to remain anonymous said to go for quality over quantity of posts, not to be afraid of the long post, and to choose a blog title early in the alphabet so it shows up near the top of alphabetical blogrolls. I think I’ve succeeded well with the last two suggestions at least. I definitely didn’t want a newsy blog, or a tech tips blog, or anything like that. Too many people doing that well already, and way too many people doing it badly. I’ve tried to write the blog as I might an opinion column, not too heavy, but not too light. Also, I deliberately avoided some of the tips that supposedly go to make popular bloggers. I don’t link out much to other bloggers; I don’t write about others to provoke them to write about me; though I’m not averse to the occasional scrap, I don’t feel like the blog is very polemical; my goal has never been to get a high Technorati ranking; and despite my title, I wasn’t trying to become the voice of academic librarianship, or anything like that.

Instead, I’ve tried to present the opinions of one lone librarian rather than represent the opinions of others, and I’ve tried to present those opinions in as thoughtful a manner as possible. Though I write these as essays, that is, as short exploratory pieces that may not be fully formed, still I’ve tried to avoid writing poorly reasoned pieces I’m not willing to defend.

I’ve also tried to present a somewhat non-librarian point of view. This isn’t terribly difficult for me, because I’m sort of a librarian by default. If the market for Shakespeare scholars had been strong a dozen years ago, I would probably be happily teaching Shakespeare at some liberal arts college now. Instead, I stumbled into library school because it seemed like a better choice of career than adjunct rhetoric instructor. My motto at the time was “easy to get in, easy to get through, easy to get a job,” and I was right. Even now, I’d probably be just as happy teaching rhetoric full time, but I make a lot more money and have a lot more job security as a librarian, plus I don’t have to grade so many essays. So while I like being a librarian, and I think I’m pretty good at it, I don’t always think of myself as a librarian. I think of myself as a person who loves and uses academic libraries, who identifies with the scholarly and humanistic mission of liberal education, who enjoys teaching and reading, and who also happens to work as a librarian. I see the library not as an end in itself but as one part of a much larger educational mission, and I’ve tried to comment on library issues from that perspective.

In one way I’ve definitely failed. This was supposed to be a purely professional blog. Though I’ve written a couple of personal pieces for fun, like my wedding anniversary post, the goal was to focus on library issues, not on my personal life and certainly not on my library. I’ve done pretty well about not blogging the Princeton University Library. Occasionally I’ve mentioned or praised colleagues, but in general I see no benefit to blogging about my workplace, as opposed to my work. My library has good points and bad points like every library, and I could certainly tell some entertaining stories, but this blog isn’t the place for that. (See me at an ALA happy hour if you want to hear the good stuff!) However, what I didn’t count on, because I’d never done this much sustained public writing, was just how much of my personality would be on display on the blog, and I’m not sure how happy I am about that. In general, I’m a private and even reserved person with those who don’t know me. After looking back at the 100 or so posts I’ve written over the past year, it becomes clear what I think about, what my prejudices and assumptions are, what I care immensely about, and what I dismiss as folly in academic librarianship. Even that has exposed me more than I thought it would. On the other hand, I’ve grown more comfortable putting part of myself into the posts. Still, I won’t be sharing vacation photos or music recommendations with you, so you can rest easy.

To make a long post short (too late!), I thank all of you who have been reading the blog, and I very much appreciate those of you who send kind words. No more navel-gazing for now. Tomorrow I’m hoping to write about a couple of ALA programs I went to, including the one where we were told in earnest tones that the Internet is a very important part of modern communication. Stay tuned!