What a day to be back

Some days blogging on library stuff is just too easy.
(thank you Penny Arcade)

Facebook and shark jumping

I was not an early adopter when it came to social networking. I didn't see the attraction early on. I figured if I was no longer in contact with you, well I didn't care enough to keep in touch and nor did you.

Hell, perhaps I was deliberately ignoring one or two people (or in fact, almost everyone I went to school with).

If my memory is correct, I took the leap into facebook following the ALIA New Grads' Symposium in Sydney a couple of years ago. And it was then intended as a professional development tool, I befriended some of the folk I'd met at the conference, joined a couple of library related groups (or pages, or became a fan of...). It was nice and easy, library related status updates amused me. I felt connected to people across the country who were (like me) attempting to push their newgrad thinking on the intractably boring baby boomers who blocked our path to the top of the library tree (to rely on stereotypes).

But it was an idealised facebook which I joined. One without the foolish pokes and sheep throwing of the hoi polloi of the online world. However soon the real world impinged on my utopian fantasy as friends found me online.
Then friends of friends...
and school acquaintances I thought I had left behind for good.

But that alone is not the reason I am suggesting a shark has been jumped. No, I am now facebook friends with both my eldest daughter and my step-mother.

Let that sink in folks,
facebook is no so ubiquitous that there are three generations of us, from my daughter (who is keeping in contact with friends she lost touch with when we moved interstate), to my step-mother is is vainly calling out "what is a poke, it says someone poked me"

Sure, there are still librarians in my list of friends, probably more of them than any other group. And they are the most active of my friends. So I am not about to abandon facebook as a tool for a librarian, but I am no longer feeling quite as productive when I have a facebook tab open at work.

Back again? Lets wait and see

There have been (whether you knew it or not) several ADHD librarian posts written of late. However they have been placed under an embargo as I am no longer an anonymous blogger and I don't feel like harpooning my own career.

So, I have been looking at areas where I can keep blogging without risk to my life and reputation. I am now ready to try again and see if I can do some regular blogging of my world.

I was thinking of redoing the blog layout first, but have decided that is a form of procrastination, so it is the old layout and if I can blog semi-regularly then it may be worth my while doing some work on updating the layout.

So, what have I been doing since my last flurry of regular posting?
Well, I am working for an organisation with a very low level if IT support and very little in the way of new technology.
In some ways I have been trying to remedy this, but for the most part I have unfortunately been content to let my staff continue with what they have always been doing, avoiding rocking the boat...

Of course there are good reasons for this, dropping into a place as a new manager and leaping at every windmill shouting "this is how we did it at my last library"
well, that'll just set everyone offside. Still, I should have found a few more windmills to tilt by now. So, perhaps this blog will chronicle some successful jousting of a windmill or two.

I've also spent a couple of years on a committee for an ALIA biennial conference. Did I learn much form that? Well, hell yes (and some of it is perhaps worth retelling) so I may bite the hand that professionally recognises me and have a look at some of the backroom shenanigans that lead up to a (reasonably) successful conference.

I also want to do a bit of critical thinking of 2.0 'stuff' from the point of view of someone who plays with the new and the shiny, but also from the pov of an organisation where that is a new concept.

So, am I back?
no promises.