explodedlibrary.info

my return to law library land

A lot has happened in the last couple of months. My normal inclination is to write one humungous post where I try to make sense of everything, but I don’t think that such a post will ever be finished - at least not before my life has moved on and I’m thinking about other things.

So here’s one part of it. My new job.

For some reason this job seems totally different, even if it’s not. After all, I’ve worked as a law librarian before - that’s what I did when I first started blogging. Being a law librarian was my initial goal when I decided to become a librarian.

The difference is that my previous law library position was in an academic law library. The majority of my career has been in academic libraries, but this new job is with a big law firm.

In Australia, law firm blogging doesn’t seem to have taken off in the same way that it has in the US. For the time being, I’d rather not mention the particular firm where I work. It’s no dark secret (actually I am really glad to be working for this particular firm), but once I mention that word here, my name and my employers become inextricably linked through Google and other search engines. Later on I may change my mind and provide those details. That’s fine and I’d rather err by being over-cautious in the beginning. After all, if I say everything now, I can’t unsay that later on.

My initial impression is that being a law firm librarian is very different from being an academic law librarian and it’s also different from non-legal special library positions I’ve had.

One big difference from being an academic law librarian, is that in the law firms, information is not meant to be free. It is expensive and it is power and there are some boundaries which it is not permitted to cross.

The most obvious boundary is attorney-client privilege.

Another way that information is constrained are by Chinese Walls, to use the un-PC Australian colloquial term. Other words include firewalls and cones of silence. Whatever you call them, these are used when one firm represents different parties with different interests about something. It would not be a good idea to have information flowing freely between the lawyers representing these different interests.

I’ve noticed another aspect of this information exchange issue. When I receive a research request, I don’t usually receive a whole lot of background or contextual information. It was very different in academic libraries, where I saw reference interviews which resembled interrogations. It is true that more contextual information usually helped the research process.

The more I’ve started to think about this, I wonder if maybe this lack of context is a mercy. After all, it would be quite disturbing for me to to hear detailed information about how my work was facilitating behaviour by individuals or companies which were at odds with my own personal values.

This leads to the next big issue on my mind, which will be the topic of my next post. It is important for me to go to work knowing that I am doing good of some sort in the world. At the very least, I don’t want to be causing harm.

How are these concerns resolved in the law firm environment?

different ways of dealing with obstacles

A few months back I went on a short walk to see Terrace Falls in the Blue Mountains. I wanted to try some different tracks in the area, a wish which led me to a track which was little better than a kangaroo pad along a steep hillside. Maybe it was once a good track and has slowly been going back to nature. Then there were all the fallen trees in my way. After scrambling over the third or fourth such obstacle in the space of fifteen minutes, I started thinking about we deal with obstacles on the path - and in work and life.

These are just six responses, I'm sure there are more ways than this, but this is all that came to me at the time. In no particular order:

- Climb over the obstacle or go under it. There are some problems which can be fixed if  enough people dedicate sufficient time and effort to solving the solution. This seems like climbing over the obstacle. There are other obstacles which appear imposing at first, but when analyzed calmly, it's easy enough to find a good and non-disruptive workaround, which could be liked to squeezing under the obstacle.

- Leave the track and go around the obstacle. Sometimes the only way to solve a problem is to take an unorthodox approach that is not in the procedures book. The danger is when you have to depart too far from the track. If you're not careful about returning to the track as soon as possible, you may get lost. Last year I helped somebody who had been lost in Sassafras Gully for seven hours, because he had wandered from the track in dense and confusing terrain, got lost and panicked. Sometimes the danger is not so much the possibility of getting lost, but dealing with hazardous terrain, as depicted in the photo.

- Go through the obstacle. Imagine your obstacle is a deep muddy bog. There have been times I've been able to pick a way through the bog without sinking in. This approach calls for extremely good observation of what you can get away with. Walking on mud without sinking in also demands particular delicacy, but if the obstacle is a mass of leaves and branches from a fallen tree, brute force and tenacity help. This approach can be risky, and it's advisable to have a Plan B. What happens if you do sink into the mud? Sometimes I've tried this approach with office politics, wanting to stay above it - sometimes being successful, sometimes not.

- Remove the obstacle. This can be the heroic option. Not only are you dealing with the obstacle, but you're making sure that nobody else has to. It's easy to do with little obstacles, but larger obstacles require something extra, be it strength or a chainsaw. There are sometimes unforeseen consequences to this. You might remove the obstacle from your path and it throw into somebody else's path or cause some environmental damage. Last week I was walking in Dante's Glen near Lawson and came across some track maintenance workers clearing fallen trees from the path. I was grateful for what they were doing, but I happened to be there when they rolled a huge trunk section off the track. It crushed several small trees and ferns on its way down the gully. I can't help but wonder if there had been a better way.

- Turn back and choose a different path. In the Blue Mountains there are plenty of tracks which look promising in the beginning but then deteriorate into animal pads leading nowhere. Some people turn back too soon, because the ideas of facing any obstacles is too scary. Other people are very reluctant to turn around ever. It seems like admitting defeat, that the initial decision to take this path was wrong. But after facing a huge and seemingly insurmountable obstacle or a depressing series of smaller annoying obstacles, it's worth asking the question if this path is still the right one. This could be the situation when somebody decides to leave a relationship or a job. Once you know that you are on the wrong path, it's better to cut your losses and turn around immediately. This can be quite disheartening, but hopefully the lessons learned from this wrong turn will be helpful in the future

Any of the above five approaches are fundamentally valid, they could be the best approach depending on the person or the circumstances. There's one other response I'd like to mention. This is how it goes: If you reach the obstacle, close your eyes. Close your eyes and try not to think about whatever the obstacle is. After a while - seconds, minutes, or even years later - open your eyes again, hoping that the obstacle has disappeared. If that didn't happen, just repeat and try again until the obstacle does disappear. The hope is that if you try hard enough at ignoring the obstacle, the better the chances of it going away. No, it's not a very effective method, but I'm mentioning it because it's very popular with libraries who don't like how their users have changed lately.

sometimes endings end

I have decided that it's time to re-open the explodedlibrary. I had been blogging for over five years, and have learned that it is not straight forward to just stop it. For one thing, this blog is irrevocably linked with me. Even if I deleted this blog, that would be true. When people search for me, the first thing they find is this blog. With this blog closed, it may appear that I haven't said or done anything or thought about anything since November 2007. Of course that's not true.

My life has changed during the last few months. There were some things going on last year which were making it very difficult to blog. As I wrote in the bunker,

Mergers and acquisitions happen all the time amongst organizations associated with libraries. One's happened to MPOW. Yes, mergers and acquisitions happen all the time, but a merger amongst true equals seems to be extremely rare. There usually is a dominant party and a subordinate party. It has turned out that my place of work is on the losing end of this merger. There is now an integration process underway. Integration after a merger is a strange process. The integration that I'm experiencing means that the subordinate party is completely disintegrated and then parts of it are absorbed into the dominant party and the rest is discarded.

A little over a month after I wrote that, my library had been shut down. I could have had a job in the big university library if I had wanted it, but I decided that it was a good time to move on from that university and looked elsewhere. Fortunately I found something good without too much stress and botheration. It was very painful to go through this merger - the uncertainty and lack of information about the process, the depressing thought that our users would be worse off and there wasn't anything that could be done about it.

A few months later on, I am starting to view this as one of those odd twists which life takes, and as horrible as it was to go through it then, now I can see that it has opened doors which I never would have braved.

So my life has changed. I've had enough of a break from blogging that I feel excited about getting back into it. Not that I'm going to be posting very frequently, probably three posts a month will be a very good month. I'm also working on liberariesinteract.info again, and I expect that my more conventional library posts will be going there.

even blogs have an end

This blog has seen a few changes over the years, and many in this last year. But it's not enough.

The trouble with blogging is that a blog has no natural end point. Other forms of writing all have an end. When one thing is finished, it's easier to begin something else. Yes, blogs can develop and change over time, as this one has. But there are limits to this, and after five years, I think I have reached that limit with this blog. So I've decided to retire this blog. There's another reason as well, but I'd rather not go into that here.

I still haven't got blogging out of my system. I'm not giving it up, I'm just winding down this blog. There are one or two more posts in the pipeline, and once I've published them in the next month or so, I'll be taking an indefinite break from updating this blog.

I'm planning on taking a complete break from blogging. Then I'll probably start a new one. The new one won't be as closely related to my work as a librarian - the place for those kinds of posts is here. To reiterate, I'm not shutting down this blog and I'm not ruling out the possibility that I may bring it out of retirement when some time has passed.

I'd like to finish with some thank yous. Thanks to all the bloggers who encouraged me at the very beginning in 2002, who linked to me and made me feel welcome in what was then such a small community. Thanks also to amazing group of Australian librarian bloggers at librariesinteract.info. It was fun and also a privilege working with you and learning from you. Thanks to everyone who commented on posts. I appreciate your contribution and wish I had been a little more diligent to replying to your comments on the blog. Finally, thanks to the readers who have stuck with me over the years and put up with my irregular posting schedule and the seemingly random choice of posts.

It's not goodbye yet, because there's definitely one more post to come, maybe two.

afr.com follow up

[8 October 2007 update: As I find out about new stories about afr.com, I will be adding them here]

There's been a flurry of posts and articles on the future of afr.com. If they are to be believed, it's much hated flash interface will soon be abandoned. I've decided to compile a list of all this commentary which has appeared since I wrote about afr.com back in June. In roughly reverse chronological order-

• Lara Sinclair, Fairfax defends paid site, The Australian, 26 November 2007
• Miriam Steffens, Fairfax stands by Financial Review website fee, Sydney Morning Herald, 8 November 2007
• Peter Griffin, Knives out over web sales, NZ Herald, 5 October 2007
• Andrew Dodd, To pay or not to pay: the Fairfax online dilemma, Crikey, 3 October 2007
• Matthew Ricketson, Finance pages tangled as web revolution overwhelms print evolution, Melbourne Age, 3 October 2007
• Lance Wiggs, Good AFR.com news - but will they finally get it?, 25 September 2007
• Seth Yates, AFR.com site to relaunch, 25 September
• Jane Schulze, Fairfax 'got it wrong' on afr.com, The Australian, 24 September 2007
• Jesse Hogan, AFR to unveil new, less Flash website, Melbourne Age, 22 September 2007
• Sonja Koremans, Kirk admits AFR site was bungled, B & T Weekly (Australia), Sep 21, 2007. p. 3
• Mark, Will AFR.com be next to go free?, Australian Newsagency Blog, 19 September 2007
• Duncan Riley, The End Of The Pay For Content Model Is Nigh, TechCrunch, 18 September 2007
• The embarrassment of AFR.com, Crikey, 17 September 2007
• Mark, Making news free online, Australian Newsagency Blog, 9 August 2007
• Mark Day, Fairfax punts on 'different' afr.com, The Australian, 2 August 2007
• Ben Kremer, More on afr.com - a quick traffic analysis, LawFont.com, 18 June 2007
• Ben Kremer, How not to conduct an ebusiness, LawFont.com, 8 June 2007

There are just three observations I'd like to make about this.
1. As late as August, Fairfax seemed to be brushing aside all criticism, other than the obvious, that afr.com was slow and they were working on that. Now the Managing Director of Fairfax admits that "we got it wrong" and other Fairfax publications are being critical of afr.com. What caused this change? I wonder if the tipping point was the decision of the New York Times to abandon its walled-garden in mid September and the rumours that the same thing may happen at the Wall Street Journal.
2. Previously I was quite baffled by the behavior of Michael Gill, head of Fairfax Business Media. Now I think I know what he's trying to do. The idea of having a usable website for the Australian Financial Review newspaper is oh so boring, especially when he could do something amazing like turn afr.com into Bloomberg-lite. The trouble is that people don't  seem to want that. I'm not sure that Michael Gill's boss, David Kirk, wants that anymore.
3. The users of my library (business school faculty and students) seem to have got used to life without searching for or citing AFR or BRW content. The typical user reaction has been something like, “Well, that’s too bad I can’t use stuff from the Fin any more – so what else is available online?” If that’s what Michael Gill wanted, he can give himself a big pat on the back.

Holly Throsby in Katoomba on a Sunday night

Last night I had a lovely evening watching Holly Throsby in concert at the Clarendon in Katoomba. Living in the Blue Mountains and working in Sydney is not exactly easy, but I was glad I was able to see this Sunday night concert and then be home at a reasonable hour.

The venue at the Clarendon was lovely and small. It's basically a normal restaurant room with a stage on one end. If you buy a ticket there with a meal, you're sitting at a table right by the stage. Just a metre or two away from the main microphone. But it's a lot cheaper to just see the concert, and if you book early, you can get a good seat (in such a small venue, they're all good). My group was just behind the tables.

The support act was Stephanie Dosen, originally from Wisconsin. She was great. Very chatty and funny. There was quite a contrast with her banter between songs and the actual songs, many of which were pensive and delicately beautiful. Afterwards there was quite a queue of people buying Stephanie's CD, which she was selling and autographing.

I have seen Holly Throsby in concert only once before, when she appeared as a special guest at a Sarah Blasko concert in the Seymour Theatre in April. She and Sarah sang three songs together, including an amazing cover of Eleanor Rigby. Last night, Holly was accompanied by Jens Birchall on cello, backing vocals and possibly mandolin, as well as Bree van Reyk, on drums, accordion, backing vocals, glockenspiel, bells, casio - quite the multi-tasker she was.

Holly played a few brand new songs from the album she's going to be recording in Nashville in around two months. I really liked them. The rest were a fairly representative spread from Holly's two LPs and most recent EP. She also played a cover of a Bob Dylan song, which was the only thing which didn't do much for me - probably because I'm not really into Bob Dylan.

There were a few moments which seemed a little unpolished, but I don't think anybody minded. I don't think anybody seeing Holly Throsby on a Sunday night in Katoomba expects to see something sickly slick and polished. Last night's performance was authentic and intense, with an undercurrent of poignancy. Holly spoke a little about what prompted her to write the song Under the Town and a Widow's Song, one of the new songs she played.

After the encore, Holly and Bree and Jens sold autographed CDs and these amazing little hand-drawn comic books which Holly has made as companion pieces for Under the Town and One of You for Me.

Photo credit: neil365 on flickr, Creative Commons License

different blogs, different masks

Sometimes I think that if I were starting blogging today, I would choose to write under a pseudonym. I think that I may have wanted that initially, but the blogging software I was using at the time - Radio userland - had a default of displaying the blogger's name. Before I learned how to turn that off, my name was already out there in links from other bloggers. It's interesting how little seemingly random accidents can have a lasting impact.

But I wasn't too worried that my name was out there. At first it seemed that my blogging life would always be quarantined from the rest of my life. It seemed like a long long time before I met any other bloggers face to face or anyone who had read my blog.

Of course everything's different now. I am aware that every word I write is potentially viewable by my past, present and future employers and co-workers, prospective girlfriends, exes, friends and enemies, all sorts of family members, including my mother. When I get an idea for a post, at some point I need to decide whether this is the sort of post I want to have on my blog, given all of this.

If I blogged under a pseudonym, I wouldn't have to worry about this. I could be more controversial and not worry about alienating the prejudiced and easily offended. There would be other things to worry about - namely protecting my secret identity. When writing about specific work or personal things, I couldn't be too detailed, or I would need to fictionalize some of the details (although that can be fun). I would need to keep other bloggers at arm's length, and would be reluctant to attend blogging meetups or be involved in a group like lint.

I do think that there are advantages and disadvantages to both kinds of authorship.

I don't buy into the "named bloggers are inherently more ethical and accurate" argument either. For me, the potential readership of this blog does make me feel personally accountable for my blogging - to play nice with others and not be sloppy in my research or writing. But just because it's like this for me, I can't assume that it's like this for everyone or that the converse is true - that anonymous/pseudonymous bloggers don't care about playing nice or checking their facts. Recently at MPOW I was put in a very unusual situation - of needing to find a shortlist of blogs in a subject I didn't know a lot about, project management. Although I feel very reticent about rating blogs, I devised a quick & dirty way that I could live with. Whether the blog was written under a pseudonym or by a named author was irrelevant. It's possible that under my criteria, a named blog by somebody who really has made a name for themselves may receive bonus points, but that's as far as it would go. If a blog - be it named or pseudonymous - contained mean-spirited ad hominem attacks, I'd probably rate it low for "quality" and give it negative bonus points.

Before I finish, I should probably mention that this post is my indirect response to the Annoyed Librarian's post on this. I have a lot of time for the Annoyed Librarian. We have a couple of things in common: we are both skeptics about the librarian shortage and we have both made fun of 2.0 stuff. I still think that the Library 2.0 label has done more harm than good. I care deeply about the components, which existed quite happily before anyone made up the lame Library 2.0 term. It still annoys me that these pre-existing technologies and ideas have been co-opted by Library 2.0, when I think they would have been better off left on their own. Mark my words, it won't be long before Library 2.0 sounds as cringe worthy as that mid-1990s gem "information superhighway." Where I differ from the Annoyed Librarian is that I do care about advancing much of what has been labelled Library 2.0. Because of this, I have been willing to jump on the Library 2.0 bandwagon when it's helped me communicate and work with colleagues, and then I jump off again and it's been ok.

See also

the power and/or vulnerability of named and anonymous bloggers (July 2005)

photos of the APEC fence

Police backed on photo ban of APEC fence, Sydney Morning Herald, 3 September 2007

Tourists forced to delete fence photos, The Australian, 2 September 2007

flickr search on the APEC fence

Fortress Sydney, Digital Photo Gallery of Ted Szukalski

John Howard Readies Fortress Sydney, Stuff-Em-Up the hill backwards

© 2007 Bruce Phelan

in flux

People who read this blog in readers won't see it, but I have changed the look of this blog - the first significant change in over 4 years. The change is long overdue. One reason why I kept that design for so long was that I haven't seen many blogs in yellow and white, and those colours almost seemed like a personal trademark, and so I thought that I might as well keep them. I come across way too many books and articles about branding at MPOW and I wonder if I have absorbed some of those ideas. A blog is a brand of sorts, and it pays to have some consistency of message and look. Of course, stagnation is even worse than lack of consistency. This is a very different blog from what it was four years ago, and it's about time that the look reflected that. For one thing, I now have more posts with images and so it makes sense to have a design which enhances and is enhanced by the graphics. I'm glad that I found a design which has a similar look to the old design, so there is still some consistency.

When I first chose the name of this blog, I thought that the name sounded interesting and was an apt metaphor for what was happening with information and libraries. I was not expecting that the ideas behind this metaphor would continue to develop and evolve and sweep me along with it. At first I was thinking about how I might survive and cope as chaos infiltrated my work as a librarian. Now the chaos is no longer quite so new and scary, and I am thinking about how I can use it and thrive in it.

why I choose blogging

This post is the somewhat delayed sequel to my writing games post, but it's also about five years of blogging.

Before in my writing games post, I stated that different forms of writing - blogging, journalism, academic writing - each have their place in the world, serving different functions and attracting different types of people. Now I want to say why for me, I choose blogging.

When I write, I want my words to be findable. Not just for me, not just for my professional peers, but for anyone who for whatever random or serendipitous reason might be interested.

There was a very interesting exchange the other week between Lorcan Dempsey and Walt Crawford over Walt's description of blogs as "grey literature" in Cites & Insights 7:9. I don't want to misquote Walt, while he also described blogs as grey literature, he also said that grey literature represented the most compelling and worthwhile literature in the library field today. For the person who doesn't have the information retrieval resources or skills of a librarian, it is the professional library literature which is closer to what is usually known as grey literature - that which is difficult to impossible to find in full-text, and when it is available, prohibitively expensive.

It is a valid point that because blogs are not indexed and systematically archived, they may be very difficult to find in the future, even more difficult to find than a peer reviewed article published in an obscure library journal. I think it's likely that as the blog medium develops and matures, more blogs will be indexed and archived in some form, if only on a selective basis (thus requiring the involvement of some sort of gatekeeper). This has already happened with projects like the Internet Archive and projects like PANDORA in Australia. My other response to this, is to trust that if a blog post had any impact, it may have been noticed by someone else - and that even if the blog disappears, some of the traces which the blog left on the blogosphere during its time may remain. That answer might not be be satisfying to a researcher, but as a writer, it suffices for me. It's not quite the same as producing a physical item, such as a book or a printed journal article, and knowing that the physical item will be around long after I'm gone. But there's more to posterity than physical objects - what is the point of being published if it means that you are less likely to be read in the present and short-term future than if your words were available online right now? Which reminds me that I don't care much for posterity - I care more about what I'm writing now than what has happened to what I wrote five years ago.

I'd rather my words be scattered in the gigantic haystack where most people are playing than held in a closed stack where only the elite are allowed in.

There are other reasons why I choose blogging - I'm not going into them all here, but the medium of academic writing increasingly seems broken in the twenty-first century. Rising serial costs are making these sources even more inaccessible and obscure. There's also the problem of the unacceptable delays between submission and publication (even up to five years!). It's a game which has zero appeal to me, which is ok, because I probably wouldn't play it very well anyway. And so I finish where I began, each to her or his own.

see also:
Stephanie Willen Brown, Blog- or Print Publishing?, CogSci Librarian
Mark Lindner, Keeping up, why is it always forward-thinking?, Off the Mark
Dani Rodrik, Why publish in a journal if you can disseminate online?, Dani Rodrik's weblog

Currently playing in iTunes: We're Good People But Why Don't We Show It? by Holly Throsby