Blogging in June
The past few years I have participated in an activity known as ‘Blog every day in June’. It’s a collection of (mostly) librarian types taking on the challenge to blog every day for a month. In 2013 I’m taking a year off this project, although I’m going to keenly follow the list of participants on Flexnib’s blog. My aim this year is to read and make meaningful comments – sprinkling my reading liberally across as wide a range of blogs as I can manage.
Good luck everyone! If you’re a first time #blogjune participant, hang in there. It doesn’t really matter if you miss a day or two here or there, it’s just a great excuse to challenge yourself to write something every day.
Conference support from afar
On Monday this week, I had the opportunity to be involved in a presentation to NLS6 in Brisbane. While staying in Sydney.
Using twitter, @alysondalby and I sat in a room in Sydney providing links and information while our colleague @katecbyrne did the standing-up-in-front-of-a-crowd-thing in Brisbane to present on the benefits of international librarianship and launch the International Librarians Network pilot project. How did we know where she was up to? A muted telephone call (that was declared up front) and lasted through the presentation so that we could hear what Kate was saying and follow along on our own copy of the powerpoint presentation. Keep it simple!
I have captured the whole thing on Storify – both our tweets from a room in Sydney and the participation of the audience in Brisbane. There’s even a few hellos from the international librarians who kindly agreed to take part in our presentation via video.
It was a great example of the collaboration and participation from afar that social media – and twitter in particular- makes possible at conferences. We felt part of it here in Sydney even though we were unable to make the trip to Brisbane and I hope our participation helped to spread the message about the pilot far and wide as our tweeting was designed to include links and shout-outs to our international connections.
The pilot is about to close but there will be another round later in the year that will also incorporate any feedback we get from the pilot.
Creating international connections
After a trip to IFLA last year, a colleague at MPOW dreamed up a project to facilitate online peer-mentoring relationships between librarians from around the world and as sometimes happens with this particular colleague, got a few others (including me) involved.
The International Librarians Network invites librarians to participate in a 6 month facilitated program where the co-ordinators will match you up with someone you don’t know, based on a few details you give about your professional interests. Relationships are then supported over the 6 month period with discussion topics and suggestions about ways to communicate and professionally connect.
For the first 6 months in 2013 the program will run as a pilot and there is still time to join up – go and sign up today! The program is keen to attract librarians from as many different parts of the world as possible to give it a true international flavour and ensure a widespread sharing of ideas.
Much more information about the program can be obtained from looking at the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page on the program website.
I’m pleased and proud to be associated with this project and just sorry I can’t be at NLS6 in person next week to help launch the pilot.
The BlogJune community
One of the challenges of participating in #blogjune (apart from the obvious one of having to come up with something to say every single day) is getting around to other people’s blogs and reading and commenting on the posts.
I am a firm believer that since this is a blog challenge, if I agree or disagree, or am moved or inspired by a post then I will comment about that on the post, rather than as a reply to the tweet that may have alerted me to the post in the first place. To this end, I love to make use of @katejf’s wonderful list of June bloggers that she has collected into a Netvibes page here. By accessing the blog posts from this page I bypass the twitter notification completely – as well as picking up on posts that may not have been publicised in another way.
Using the Netvibes page also exposes me to blogs I don’t normally follow. An RSS feed means it’s easy to keep reading the same ones and one of the things I love about the #blogjune challenge is discovering new people! I try to read & comment on at least one a day from someone I don’t know as part of the challenge to myself.
And look, we are already a quarter of the way there folks!
Abstractedly writing
I’m distracted. I’m co-writing an abstract for a conference. It’s the first one I’ve done so it’s a learning experience. I’m one of those people who usually has trouble getting up to the word limit in an essay because I’d rather say it in one sentence than 3. This is not necessarily an attribute of course!
To some extent, I’m inspired by last year’s ALIA Sydney event on writing a conference paper, but I’m also encouraged to do this at MPOW and am finally leaping in. I must say it’s nicer to be sharing it with someone who’s done this before (rule 1: get a mentor!).
So, with that and a few more things going on professionally this week, my blogging mojo is a little thin. And to be fair, I am also drafting a guest post for ALIA Sydney’s #blogjune effort.
Thinking time

Unshelved 31 January 2012
I love this. I’m lucky enough to be ‘allowed’ to have thinking time at MPOW – it’s part of our job and often leads to new and interesting things. It’s not necessarily sitting-still-thinking, it might be an informal discussion over coffee with a colleague gathering ideas, or reading a blog post, or talking about twitter, or bouncing an idea for a research project.
All of this ‘thinking’ time means I am better prepared when I talk with academics, I know more about library services and options and I’m a more informed library professional. This is good.
Information silos: or where choosing twitter has let me down

News waves by kevin dooley via flickr CC
I’m going to be bold (and controversial?) and say that I think I am generally less informed as a result of my involvement with twitter.
Don’t get me wrong. I love twitter. I love the connection to a professional community of like minded others and the speed and ease of communicating with those folks. I love the constant, never ending flow of information past my door – and the fact that I can dip in and out of that flow to pick out the things that catch my eye. I would find it both difficult and isolating to be without twitter and my personal learning network.
However, as I’ve mentioned before – I miss browsing and now I’ve found that I’m missing out on a range of information because of the way I have chosen to have that information fed to me. I rely increasingly on twitter for that data flow – but of course the people I follow on twitter are folk with similar interests to mine. Otherwise I probably wouldn’t be following them. On Facebook, I not only limit myself to family and friends (and the occasional page about one of my personal interests) but now the Facebook news feed changes limits that even further by deciding for me which updates I will see.
What all of this means is that increasingly I am less and less likely to come across information, material or news from outside my silo. Yes, I follow some news and journalists on twitter – but I don’t have twitter open on my desktop all the time and in the vast flood of information it’s easy to miss stuff. I can’t physically spend the time scrolling back through the hours and hours of tweets I missed – it’s just not practical. Examples of things I missed? I didn’t know there’d been a nursing home fire in Quakers Hill this week. I didn’t know about the ‘formals scam’ that meant hundreds of Sydney school kids lost money on booking formals and after parties. I didn’t know there are bushfires happening in WA. Did I need to know these things? Probably not, but I don’t like feeling uninformed about issues that are out there being talked about. Would these things have come across my twitter feed? Undoubtably, but as I said, I’m not connected to twitter 24/7.
The way around this of course, is to add yet more ways of getting information. For example, I could go back to reading the paper (either online or in print, I don’t have a preference), or listening to radio news (I love radio as a medium and it’s my biggest regret about using public transport to work, that I miss out on radio news and current affairs time). At least by browsing the paper, or listening to the whole news broadcast things come across my radar that are otherwise outside my ‘bubble’ and I am forced to at least be aware of the political, social and economic environment that continues to exist around me in spite of my seeming best efforts to pretend that it’s not. My twitter feed is the equivalent of only listening to the news stories that already resonate with or interest me.
Time wise this additional information scan would probably be at the expense of time on twitter. However, if I give up time on twitter I am also giving up the community building and social interaction that comes with the medium – and I don’t really want to give that up.
In addition, there’s the silo-ing that’s being done to me by others – mostly companies that collect my data, my browsing history or my favourite search terms and use that information to package up yet more links, suggestions or results in a similar area. Have a look at this post about personal data life-logging, or this one about giving up Google if you want to explore that further. This is an extension of my self-imposed silos but more importantly and perhaps more dangerous in the longer term, it means increasingly I am given/fed/exposed to information and news feeds that I am comfortable with, from people and organisations I generally agree with or am aligned with. There’s not much in my news feed that is confronting, challenging or makes me sit up and think – it’s a ‘yes men’ situation waiting to happen. Not recommended in business and I would argue similarly dangerous personally.
For heavens sake, twitter even once suggested that I follow @newgradlib because we are similar. Of course we’re similar. It’s me.