Happy Birthday, Blog - 10 years!

It is hard for me to believe that it has been ten years since I started this blog. But, yesterday, marked the 10th anniversary of the blog. I have published 584 posts - there are some still in draft mode which may, or may not see the light of day.

I am in my third job, and state, since starting. I have had a lot of changes in my life which I could never have imagined ten years ago. Some are good. Some were much more painful.

The blog has varied in purpose. Originally, it had a good deal of library content - including reflections on my day job, and information/thoughts about ALA. I was serving on the ALA Executive Board - actually, I was more than half way through.

There was a time when the blog was just a parking place for links - mostly library related.

More recently it has become a more personal and philosophical forum, but still with a focus on libraries.

I don't get many comments, but I do get a lot of views. I guess, I don't worry about that any more. It amazes me to see that ALA 101, written in 2006, still gets traffic. I did go and look at it last year, and it is still pretty accurate.

Anyway, thanks for reading!

Hiatus?

If anyone still reads this, you may have noticed that my posting frequency has declined quite a bit. Only 37 posts in the first ten months of the year. Of those, 4 were vacation notes in July, 3 were "Library Day in the Life" posts (2 for round 6, one for round 7), and 7 were related to ALA (midwinter, annual, and the LITA "kerfluffle").

While one of the recent uses has been for me to track some interesting blog posts from others (by including links here), I am considering a hiatus. Most of the posts during this calendar year (12 of 20) were collections of links. That is an average of "only" one per week for the non-special topics.

So, maybe I no longer have much to say. Or maybe I don't have the time and burning desire to say it. How long long will the hiatus last? I don't know.

Permanent death? Maybe, we will see.

"Library Rockstars" and the "Great/Radical Middle"

Walt Crawford does the wonderful Cites and Insights on a regular basis (monthly with occasional special additional issues).

Among the things I appreciate about Cites and Insights is that Walt actually cares about how it looks on the page. This past year he changed typefaces, and in various places there were discussions about that. I found when I started a job which including newsletter production, that I care about how things look on a page. The Adobe PDF format is great for that, because the creator gets to really determine how it will look, and the user can't change it.

Before ALA Midwinter 2010, Walt produced a special issue ("Cites ON a Plane 2010"). I am sad that he will be taking it down, now that Midwinter is over, but do understand why. After all, it is a collection of items which have previously appeared in Cites and Insights. However, either I missed some of the issues (and I generally print out each issue and share it with colleagues), or I am now reading and reacting to them through a different lens. One of my insights in this compilation is how true Walt is to his word when he calls himself (in Walt at Random) "The library voice of the radical middle."

The "rockstar" article is from the June 2008 issue (pp. 13 - 20) [it is in html here].

Indeed, I started composing this before getting to the end of the Cites on a Plane issue, and find that the "On the Middle" article is equally engaging. Appropriately enough, this article is from the December 2007 issue (pp. 16-22) [it is in html here]. (Isn't December usually a time for reflecting back on the year? This article certainly has some cogent reflections which are still true two years later.)