Here’s the thing, I have some longer-form things I may want to actually *write* rather than just think about writing, but long-form doesn’t really go over well in Blog World. So I’d like to have a place to put those that’s a little separate from my main blog, and then I’d like to use this blog to just gloss those a little and point to the longer essays in case anyone’s interest gets whetted. So I guess what I want is an “essays” page here that’s really another blog to house the essays.

I could use the “more” tag, but that would still dump the long essay in people’s RSS aggregators (I think), which seems a little inconsiderate of those who really don’t want to slog through more than a few paragraphs of my writing at a time.

I could use “pages” that are just not included in the navigation, but that would rely pretty heavily on a plugin. And besides, true masochists who might want to subscribe to those essays would be out of luck.

I could simply upload completely separate files and link to them, but I’d really like to avoid that scenario. For one thing, I doubt I’d ever actually do it if it required too many different types of composition platforms and upload steps. That starts to seem like work!

And if any of you suggest I go in for formal publication… but no, you wouldn’t do that to me, would you? I’m allergic to formal publication.

So I don’t know quite what to do, or if this is even a good idea. Any ideas?

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While you’re here, let me know if there’s something that’s not working the way you think it should (internal permalinks are definitely one of those things, I know — I’m investigating my options there). Perpetual Beta, Baby!

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The blog template portion of my reflections probably isn’t very interesting. Little by little I’m tweaking small things like line spacing, distribution of white space, and figuring out how to keep the sidebar from competing for eye-time with the body text. (Just as a side note, I’ve realized that for the kind of writing I do, the sidebar and the navigational function it represents isn’t the most important piece of the site, and therefore shouldn’t have the coveted left side.) I know just enough CSS to mess up a good template, and I use it so rarely that every time I do, I have to relearn it. But little by little I’m tweaking the site to allow for easier reading. And this challenge is enough fun that I’m ignoring the little voice in my head that screams, “But everyone’s reading this in their feed readers anyway! Who cares what the site looks like!!”

The article’s respect for the reader, though, has much farther reaching implications. It stretches into the far corners of my experience to touch everything from interpersonal relations to prose. For example, my co-workers and I were talking over dinner about how the best managers are those that assume that their employees have good intentions and want to do well. This assumption helps them approach difficult situations in constructive ways, and goes a long way toward helping employees to actually do well. I realized that this was analogous to the epiphany I had in graduate school when I realized that the best articles and essays assumed that those who did or would disagree with them had arrived at their conclusions in perfectly reasonable ways. Up until that point, I’d thought the best “argue against those who disagree with you” portions of my papers should be point by point deconstructions of my opponent’s arguments with the goal of showing how much smarter I was than they were. But as it turns out, in the real world this just makes people think you’re arrogant and a bit of a rhetorical show-off.

No, what I like about Mandy Brown’s writing is that she didn’t take the easy attacks on either side of the debate about reading online vs reading in glorious everyone-knows-this-is-aesthetically-more-pleasing print. Her writing could be appreciated by those who think books are the only way to go and those who rarely curl up with anything other than a laptop. It embodied the kind of attitude toward potentially disagreeing readers that I’ve always hoped I could pull off, if I tried very hard. And by pulling this off, Brown’s writing was not only “In Defense of Readers,” but it also defended its readers from the gratuitous barbs that might have prevented them from hearing her underlying arguments.

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Two years ago, I mentioned that participating in the biblioblogosphere was like attending a conference every day. A year ago, a good portion of my evenings were spent reading, thinking about, and responding to other librarians’ blogs. This was what kept me feeling connected to the larger world of librarianship. This was what made me feel useful beyond my own patron community. And this was a major source of contact with librarians whom I had come to regard as friends.

But lately, I wake up to find that my RSS aggregator has very few new posts from this once-prolific core of librarian bloggers, and I certainly haven’t been contributing to anyone’s aggregator overload recently. Not by a long stretch.

In my darker moments, I worry that we’re a little bit burned out, or that we’ve given up trying to change the world by weighing in on issues large and small. But while there may be some of this at work, I think it has more to do with a shift in communication patterns. Two years ago, blogs provided a venue for people’s carefully thought-out ideas as well as for their off-the-cuff thoughts, gut reactions, and general banter. In this way, they were like the sessions and the between- and after-session banter at a conference. Today I think that blogs have begun to take on the more focused character of the actual sessions at a conference while places like Twitter and FriendFeed have become the venue for the between-and after-session banter. We pass each other in the micro-blogging hallway, have conversations about everything from OCLC’s latest craziness to weekend entertainment plans, shout hello to other passers-by, and show each other our pictures or the latest new gaget we’re playing with. Then, when we have something more formal to say, we take the time to sit down and compose a blog post to present to our peers.

Then again, maybe this is just a very long justification for the decline and fall of a small portion of the librarian blogosphere.

It’s not for lack of things happening or anything like that. As far as I can tell, it started with a sudden surge in readership (which made me suddenly quite shy), coupled with extra-crazy-busy schedules, all of which coincided with my starting to work on projects with people that I didn’t think would be comfortable with their work being blogged. I also had a 6-month slump in energy, which didn’t help any of this stuff.

But I don’t think that’s all of what’s changed for me. I think that fundamentally, this space has changed. For one thing, I’m not a brand new librarian any more, no matter how much I know that I still have a world of expertise to acquire. I’m not constantly figuring out what my place is in this profession like I was when I started writing here. But more than that, like Dorothea I’m finding that changing context is changing everything, and that I’m trying to figure out either how to make this back into my living room or how to come to terms with the fact that it’s not my living room. All of which means that I’m kind of inventing a new purpose and context for this space as I go along. It’s turned far more essay-ish than it was before, with far fewer links, and I’ve felt more compelled to have “complete thoughts” than I used to. And I’m not sure if that’s good or bad or just different, or if I like it or not, but that’s what’s happened.

I’m hoping to step back into this blog and fit it to myself again. I really do miss the burning desire to get home every night and write something. And while I’ll probably never write every day, I think there’s hope that I’ll figure out my contexts, especially now that I’ve taken some time off this summer and have started to feel a little more energetic.

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Of course, then came hours and hours of fighting with Blogger to make it sit right on the page (I’m sorry, Tim. I didn’t know it’d be such a hassle). But now each time I look at my blog I think about how talented and generous Tim is.

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One thing that confuses me is my sidebar. Every once in a while it refuses to sit in its natural spot off to the left and migrates, for no known reason, down to the bottom of the page. I don’t think it’s far enough south to have warmer weather down there, so I’m at a bit of a loss. If anyone has any ideas, I’m open to hearing them.

Update: Reducing the sidebar width from 25% to 20% seems to have done the trick. Yay! But I’m still open to suggestions for other things to change. This is still pretty much an out-of-the-box theme.

Update 2: Grrr… Walt’s Tweak kills the blog in IE. Will have to investigate sometime when better coding minds than mine can help me.

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I won’t say this is my biggest weakness as a blogger, but it’s right up there. So I’ve been watching with interest as other blogger-librarians undertake the 2008 Comment Challenge. And while I watch them work through this challenge, I’ll try to think about my own commenting and comment-watching practices. How important is it that I watch comments? Am I OK with my default mode of catching up with comments when somebody else reminds me to go look? If not, is there a way that I can remember to check comments on other people’s blogs that fits into my online lifestyle?

Those of you that have this thing figured out. How do you do it?

p.s. Goodness! I just realized I missed my blogaversary… over a month ago! This blog is now entering its third year.

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Not surprisingly, an underlying theme of the presentations and discussion sessions was communication. How do you communicate effectively in new media? How do you communicate the worth and weight and legitimacy of a reference question to an embarrassed student? How do you communicate the value of the library to faculty at a liberal arts institution?

These are posts for another evening, though, because what’s been on my mind today started as a lunch-time conversation on a similar theme. I was talking to Barbara Fister (who writes in too many places to make name-linking easy, so I’ll just choose ACRLog for her this time) and two librarians from St. Olaf when the topic of professional communication came up. Specifically, where is the professional discussion about librarianship happening right now, and what’s happening with email lists?

And it got me thinking (again) about the modes of professional communication that work for me and the ones that don’t. And for me, for most things, email lists do not work. Something about writing a post to an email list intimidates me to my very core. This feels odd to say, since I happily write here for all to see. And yet, the though of all those “lurkers” on email lists paralyzes me. Maybe it’s because whatever I’d post to an email list will end up in somebody’s inbox. I’m shy about “spamming” people who may not know me or care about what I have to say, especially when I don’t know who I’m spamming. At least with this blog, I know that if you click on my URL or subscribe to my feed, you meant to do that. And if I get on your nerves you can just not read me any more. This sense that I’m not intentionally intruding on people’s inboxes seems to be the key to my being able to actually participate in a professional community.

I’ll write later about why I think multiple modes of communication are important, but it boils down to this: different people are shy about different things. I’m shy about intruding on people’s inboxes. Other people are not, and I always appreciate when people email me. (Hey, I never claimed to be logical!) Email lists just don’t work for me. I’m glad they work for others.

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