pre-internet blogging

i sort of half-laughed at today’s non-sequitur comic.  it’s odd to think of someone standing on the front stoop of his house, reading his writings aloud through a megaphone.(*)  blogging, or writing down what’s important to you in a public forum, can be risky because it makes you accountable for your ideas and opinions.  it also makes you relevant to what’s going on in the field of librarianship because people find out who you are and what you care about.

since i wrote the blog post on usage statistics i’ve had two library vendors contact me to talk about the problems they’re having in building tools to help librarians gather statistics.  how fantastic is that?  now we have a conversation going about something that’s important to all of us, and if we solve the problem we did it as a team.  that’s a pretty powerful possibility, and all it took was the commitment of one person to write down what she cares about.  why isn’t every librarian blogging?

* actually, that sounds kind of fun.  we could broaden it to make it an annual campus event with every department participating, each broadcasting through a megaphone what’s important to them.