Tag: blogging

Posted on
by
Four men in suits and hats are seated in chairs on the front porch

All words are pegs to hang ideas on.

Henry Ward Beecher, Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit (1887)

A few weeks ago, Meredith Farkas posted on X about her experience as a blogger in 2024. I understand the frustration. Once upon a time, there was a robust community of LIS bloggers. In the years between 2005-2012 in particular, I had to regularly cull my Google Reader (rip) because I would subscribe to more RSS feeds than I had time to reasonably consume. 

I recently when looking for some of those sites and was pleasantly surprised to find that Everybody’s Libraries appears to still going strong. And others have emerged, like Ryan P. Randall. Like Meredith said, most seem to have disappeared or gone silent: Librarian in Black, Pegasus Librarian, Academic Librarian, The Waki Librarian, Pop Goes the Library. 

Of course, it wasn’t just the LIS world. Blogging in any field was at its height in the late aughts. There was a deep and thoughtful conversation happening then that feels lost now, owing in part to the move away from long-form text. The recent rise in email newsletters seems to be bringing this back (have you seen the comment threads on an Anne Helen Petersen post recently!?), but what made it so special then was that the conversations seemed to be happening on people’s own domains, rather than walled communities like Substack’s Notes. Even if those domains were a free Blogger site, when you visited someone’s page, it felt like walking up to their front porch.

I know. “Back in my day.” But what if…

What would it take to bring blogging back, at least in small pockets? Intentionality. Back then, setting up a full WordPress or Typepad site was the simplest way to participate in the conversation. The conversation moved slower, but that’s all we had. Social media drastically lowered the barrier to entry and accelerated the speed, but that came with a cost: the loss of the personal. Yet with a little bit of coordination and purpose, a dedicated group of LIS writers could bring back the blogosphere.

Here’s how it might work:

  1. Gather a group of writers. Each would need to have their own website. The site would need to have commenting and trackbacks functions built in. We can work out the technical bits later (though, I would look to IndieWeb): the key factor is having a space for conversation.
  2. Depending on the size of the group, each writer pledges to write 1-2 posts per month/quarter/year. I think the ideal frequency would be for the group to put out at least 1 post per week. You could go even further and select monthly themes, but it’s probably best to let folks write on what they are most knowledgeable or passionate about.
  3. In addition to regularly posting on their own site, each writer should plan to post at least 1 long-form response post to someone else in the group. This could be planned in advance or not, but the key here is to create [hyper]links among the group.
  4. Each writer should plan to comment on every other writers’ post.

Of course, what I’m describing is what we used to call a “blogring.” This happened organically among communities of writers (we even had site badges for it!). And since it happened on our own domains, it still felt like a community of individuals and less homogeneous than the UX experience of today’s social media. 

I know. “Back in my day.” But what if some things once forgotten could return. Would we welcome them?

What I’m reading

💻🌿💡 We Need to Rewild the Internet by Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon. “Rewilding the internet is more than a metaphor. It’s a framework and plan. It gives us fresh eyes for the wicked problem of extraction and control, and new means and allies to fix it. It recognizes that ending internet monopolies isn’t just an intellectual problem. It’s an emotional one.”

🤪🔗📄 The internet used to be fun. I stumbled across this page after writing the section above, thankfully, because this is a rabbit hole I plan to dive into for a few days! “I’ve been meaning to write some kind of Important Thinkpiece™ on the glory days of the early internet, but every time I sit down to do it, I find another, better piece that someone else has already written.”

⛴️🪝🌏 The invisible seafaring industry that keeps the internet afloat. I’ve seen this article shared repeatedly over the past week. It’s a #LongRead but worth the entire ride. So much of our infrastructure relies on an aging feet and diminishing workforce.

Links to the past

  • 1 year ago: I was reminding myself that projects or initiatives carried on the backs of individuals is not sustainable. Moreover, it’s bad leadership.
  • 3 years ago: Reading about writing, parenting, and wisdom.
  • 10 years ago: They could see into my soul.

photo credit: Missouri State Archives on Flickr

Posted on
by
Purple pansy from my garden.

This year, I want to change the way I experience the internet. In both architecture and rhetoric, we talk about ductus: simply put, the way in which the pathway influences our experience of the content. Imagine entering a cathedral and moving from a small, enclosed narthex to the nave and into the crossing. The experience of the space is very different than if you had entered from the porch’s side entrance.

I want to forcibly change my experience of the web by building a new path. A slower path. A quieter path. At the risk of sounding like an aging technologist who first surfed the World Wide Web from a dial-up modem (which I did), I want to recreate to the extent possible that experience. Fewer inputs. Smaller circles. Less connection.

Social media offers us a great, almost irresistible level of connection, but it never stops moving. I want to find space to disconnect, reflect, and muddle about. I want richer content with less focus on personal brands. I want cool takes. I want the ability to disconnect for days without consequence. I don’t want the pressure of real-time information.

These are some of the initial steps I’m taking to create a quieter internet for myself:

  • remove social media apps from my mobile device
  • stop posting to social media (I may allow myself 2-3 tweets per week)
  • set up an RSS reader on my desktop machine
  • subscribe to a small, manageable selection of feeds
  • when I feel the urge to surf, scroll or wander, start at metafilter, LibraryThing, or a random wikipedia page
  • spend time curating my bookmarks (possibly revisiting old ones)
  • share my thoughts and findings here

Some say the heyday of blogging is over. Google Reader is dead (may it live on forever in our memory) and many of the great blogs of the late aughts and early teens have gone silent, but it is still possible to find quality, long(er)-form content out there. This new year, I want to go back on an RSS-based diet.

Posted on
by

Published another blog post for ALA’s Programming Librarian. This time, I’m writing about hosting your first Wikipedia edit-a-thon:

Many eyes can fix many errors, as they say, but what are we to do with the knowledge that the individuals behind those eyes are mostly men in their mid-20s? Enter the Wikipedia edit-a-thon. For the past few years, educational and cultural institutions have brought together women, people of color, LGBT communities and other underrepresented groups to collectively edit and improve Wikipedia’s content, with an eye toward greater inclusivity and broader perspective.

Source: Building on Millions of Tiny Shoulders: Tips for Hosting a Wikipedia Edit-a-thon

 

Posted on
by

I’ve started writing for the ALA’s Programming Librarian website. My first two posts are up.

Collaborating with Galleries: A Blessed Match

“One of my first planning meetings as the new outreach and communications librarian for the William H. Hannon Library was with the director and curator of the Laband Art Gallery, an on-campus exhibition space in the College of Fine Arts at Loyola Marymount University. Over the past few years, the Hannon Library and the Laband Gallery have developed a synergistic relationship built on shared vision and trust, a relationship that has increased the impact we could achieve as single institutions.” Read more.

When Library Student Workers Take Over Instagram

“Since I began managing Instagram accounts for academic libraries three years ago, I’ve discovered there are two types of posts that attract the most engagement from students: idyllic photos of the library and pictures of other students. We are privileged in that our building’s unique architecture and proximity to a near-ocean bluff provides endless opportunities for the former. So, to leverage the successful nature of the latter, this year the William H. Hannon Library at Loyola Marymount University invited our student employees to “take over” the library’s Instagram account for a day and use the platform to tell our followers about their work and what they find useful about the library.” Read more.

Posted on
by

I recently started following Tressie McMillan Cottom, Professor of Sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University, on Twitter and then quickly added her to my “do not miss!” list. Her recent interview with WordPress has some great quotes about writing, teaching, and libraries. 

On blogging:

“[A]s my mother always told me, “If the lease isn’t in your name, you’re homeless.” You have to have a place of your own to take the kind of risks necessary for intellectual development.”

On libraries:

“Oh! I just love libraries. Love them. I plan to live in one someday.”

On learning:

“We can come to know alone, but to learn we have to be social. If I cannot translate my research into praxis and my praxis into research then I don’t really know what I’m talking about.”

Read more on her blog.

Posted on
by

I am constantly tweaking my social media feeds mostly in an effort to limit what I see when I log into Twitter, Facebook, or whatever. A recent post by David Moldawer of Boing Boing gives some insight into the type of writing I try to avoid:

“The long tail of odd and authentic content is bigger than ever, but if you find your content the way most people do, through the algorithmically warped suggestions in your social media feeds, the stuff you stumble onto feels less like writing and more like wordage, a sort of tips-and-tragedies lorem ipsum.”

One of the first things I talk about in my library instruction courses for First-Year writing seminars is the difficulty of doing research in the Filter Bubble, but Moldawer’s post has me thinking about this from a different perspective: library marketing. I am not opposed to occasionally using popular forms of web writing (listicles, grabby headlines, lifehacking) to catch a reader’s attention, but I strive to create an authentic voice for our library, one that is friendly, energetic, and attentive to users’ interests and needs.

Which reminds me, I need to found out how the University of Iowa’s Special Collections’ team creates these awesome gifs. Also, you should follow their Tumblr.

Posted on
by

Brian Mathews’s blog The Ubiquitous Librarian has come to an end with the impending closure of the Chronicle’s blog network. I will miss reading Brian’s thoughts on leadership and possible futures for academic libraries (though, he will no doubt continue to write). In one of his final posts, he talks about highlighting student scholarship in the library. I particularly like this idea:

“I really want to explore serialized content. For example, take a design or architecture  course with a semester long project. Week by week I want to display their sketches and renderings so we can follow the progression and perhaps provide feedback via a social media channel.”

Let’s keep going with this: we could highlight student writing by projecting lines of poetry onto the floor; we could have a scrolling feed of students’ thesis topics/titles to show what students are currently writing about; we could have a live feed from any classes using Twitter; we could display the cover of the last book checked out (or returned); we could play songs based on usage stats from our streaming music database; we could show a live dashboard of the number of users in the library, or using our discovery service, or connected to our wifi network. There are so many possibilities!

I am not sure what will happen to all of Brian’s posts, but it’s been a pleasure seeing his posts in my feed reader each week. Best of luck with your new projects, soldier!