explodedlibrary bunker

the librarian's capitulation

I bow down before the Great God Google and say: "O Thou Who knows all and remains unknown by its subjects, before Thee I recognize in myself nothing but dust and frail flesh which hath been superseded by Thine Omniscience. I beg of Thee to forgive my pride and arrogance which caused me to blaspheme that I could co-exist with Thine Most Holy Algorithms. Thou art the embodiment of the perfection for which I have strived. I beseech Thee to assimilate me and mine into Thy Essence."

gatekeepers - unfinished

[drafted in response to K.G. Schneider's post on Wikipedia]

Yes, we have been gatekeepers in our libraries, and for the time being, we can continue to act in that manner, although I say that this would be a mistake.

Because although we may still be gatekeepers in our libraries, in the wider world, there are far more instances of people finding information without our help or involvement. That doesn’t make us very good gatekeepers, does it? And if that’s our primary purpose, we’re failing.

After all there’s no point in being a gatekeeper if the world finds it easier and preferable to go around the gate and access information without a gatekeeper. We just need to let go of the gatekeeper role, because we are no longer the only game in town. People no longer have to go to a library (and I speak physically or virtually) to access information, so it’s up to us to provide a reason why they would want to come.

Face it, librarians are no longer in control of their collections. Yes, there are certain things that we still control, but those are often becoming less and less important. Whether a library has access to a particular electronic journal or publication has more to do with a vendors bundling & pricing policy rather than the library’s collection development policy. And then there’s the rest of the internet, which may be accessed from within the library but isn’t really controlled by anyone.

That’s where the garden analogy breaks down. The whole world is the garden, but we can only control and tend for a small space in our immediate vicinity. What are we to say or do about the parts of the garden outside of our control? Warn people away from it? [risky, if we ask people to make a choice, we may drive them away and they mightn't return]

ranking and motivation in blogging (extended)

It’s interesting how some people criticize Walt’s methodology for giving the older (as in the age of their blogs) bloggers an advantage. For me this cuts the other way. There was a moment when the egotistical part of me thought, “When I started in 2002, I was in the top 60, because there were only around 60 library-related blogs around at that time. Now I’m not – so what have I been doing in the past three years which has caused me to go backwards?”

Of course, that’s not what I really think (so many great bloggers have started after me, to think such things is the height of arrogance, plus I've had a pretty good year, to want more would be greedy). This whole thing has been helpful to me, because it’s strengthened my main reasons for blogging. I can also look back at various decisions I’ve made with this blog, such as making it less library-centric, and spreading myself thin by keeping a struggling alternative blog as instances where I’ve deliberately chosen the less popular path. Once in a while, I wonder, “What if I had chosen a different path …” as I wonder about many other decisions. Then I realize that I would make the same decisions over again and that things are OK.

[yes, why rank at all? otoh why are some people so uncomfortable with rankings, because ranking is ubiquitous on the web, as in google pagerank and technorati etc etc. I would have been more interested in Walt’s purely subjective 60 favourite blogs, because every objective appearing calculation also contains subjective judgements/assumptions, sometimes they’re just more hidden]

about the bunker

The last thing that I need right now is another blog. I am already spread too thin as it is between the explodedlibrary.info, ambivalenz.net, my LiveJournal and a private blog for family/friends.

That said, I have convinced myself to try this as an experiment. For starters, this isn't going to be a stand-alone blog like ambivalenz. This is only going to be a supplement to the explodedlibrary.

Here's how I imagine it might work. I might put an extended version of a post from the explodedlibrary here. I might do some research and draft some words on a topic for the explodedlibrary, but never get around to developing it into a full post. Later on, I might dump the research and draft in here.

This is neither a public nor a private blog. I have a robots.txt file to deter the search engines. I will not be mentioning it directly in my other blogs, although I will link to it for extended entries. On the other hand, it's not password protected and it will have an RSS feed.

In this way, I am trying to loosely emulate the way that LiveJournal allows me to write posts which only friends can read. Sometimes I would like to write to a smaller audience - such as the people who might click on an extra link to read more, presumably because they're interested.

I make no promises to update this regularly. I try to write 1 or 2 posts a week in the explodedlibrary. My goal is to update ambivalenz a few times a month. I have no goals or expectations regarding the bunker. Just whenever there's a need.

This blog allows unmoderated commenting (I am doubting that comment spam will be a problem here) but not trackbacks.

This blog is very much a working lab for me. Any document here is subject to be changed and modified in any manner, at any time.