Tax season and the flu. Multiplied. That's pretty much what has occupied my life for the past month and a half. That and discovering free episodes of Lost on abc.com (yes, I know, I'm quite sheltered down here in small town Okie land).

At any rate, during my hiatus I discovered that there are more library blogs out there than I am able to keep up with. I mentioned this in passing to my supervisor recently and she remarked on her own similar struggles, then noted a wise statement she had heard once. If it's important enough, it'll make its way back to you somehow. It's difficult to accept this kind of philosophy when the library profession seems to be building itself on the idea of getting the best information disseminated as fast as possible. This is how library bloggers help contribute to the profession, by filtering information so other librarians can get to the nitty gritty good stuff. However, I do sometimes feel like I'm re-reading the same thoughts over and over. I've cut back a lot on my RSS feeds because of that but the only problem is sometimes, although one blogger may be sharing repetative material one day, the next day they may write about something brilliant and completely innovative. It's hard to know who to delete. It's kind of like my mom's craft closet. She keeps everything from milk container tops to old xmas paper just in case she might use it someday.

But having too many RSS feeds just becomes over-load after awhile. For instance, while I was sick, I was in no mood to read library blogs (hence discovering the free episodes of Lost on abc.com) so when I came back to work and noticed that my reader said 1000+, I knew something had to be done. So I cut back. Although it may be possible that I'm missing out on something, I'm going to but my faith in the library karma idea and hope that anything important to my job/career will somehow get back to me. The other half of me feels like I may even get more information since the amount of RSS feeds I did have was so daunting that I often felt too overwhelmed to really read any.

I also started thinking about this blog and remembered an entry from Librarian Idol a few months back that really struck a chord with me.

When I first started blogging here, I said that:

"I want to elevate the status of the librarian in society so that it takes its proper place as a recognised profession in information science, both within the wider information industry as well as within popular culture. We need our Librarian Idols."

And I tried to pursue this through my writing, getting fired up on issues of social inequality and information literacy, trying to highlight the value that public libraries strive to bring to every single person, regardless of education, or race, or social status, and help bridge those divides in society by building information literate communities. Basically - it's important to be active in the community, and make people see the vital work that librarians do in trying to improve everybody's quality of living.

But, you know what? I don't think that blogging about it achieves anything. I'm not contributing anything new to the blogosphere. There are far more eloquent and widely-published experts who blog on these subjects, and I'm overly self-aware that my perspective as a public librarian is a lot less "academic" than other librarians who work in highly specialised sectors.

The other thing that I'm also aware of is that every librarian out there knows the shortcomings of the industry. Blogging about it doesn't help - it just cultivates an atmosphere of frustration and hopelessness.

There really are a lot of great library bloggers out there. Sometimes I read a post and think, wow, there's so much I could say about this topic, I should do a post in response, then I'll go to the next blog and what do you know, they'll have a response to the previous post I just read or be blogging about something similar and in most cases they've said the same things I would have said but in a "far more eloquent" manner. I'm not saying that I don't have anything to contribute. Blogs are virtual conversation stations and I like engaging in conversation. What I am saying is that I think it's time that I re-evaluate what it is I'm striving for with this blog. Am I trying to gain a wide readership? Do I really want a wide readership because that would only add more pressure to blog regularly (this is probably a good time to point out that I am an advocate for blogging without obligation). But what if I do have a great idea one day, something totally brilliant that could really benefit the library profession (stranger things have happened :-). I blog about it and well, because I have no real readership, nobody hears about it so nobody benifits and ideas aren't shared. Perhaps then I would need to rely on library karma again or perhaps take the leap and actually publish a real article (yikes, unknown territory). It's times like these that I realize how useful collaborative blogs are. With enough contributor's you eliminate the stress of having to blog everything yourself, gain readership and potential to share bright ideas.

I think I consider this blog to be a personal blog where I talk about my professional life. At least for the time being. If anything, I see it as a place to practice my thoughts, to write them down as I would in my trusty notebook only here it's neatly typed and readable. It's storage. I can come back later and re-evaluate, brainstorm further things that I've posted. I can use it to show future employers what I've experienced at my job here and some of my ideas on hot topics like library 2.0, information literacy, etc.

I have a friend who is currently about to finish library school and she was required to start a blog for one of her classes. She mentioned that her professor had told them that they should think about ways they could use their blog to contribute to their profession. I think this is a great practice. However, she pointed out that on a personal level she was extremely uncomfortable with the idea of blogging professionally, that it left her feeling far to exposed. This is a person who has great ideas and is going to be a very skilled professionally librarian, yet she isn't a fan of professional blogging. I can really relate to this negative feeling of exposure. There are times when the discomfort keeps me from posting. As employees we always have to consider possible scrutiny from administration. As new graduates we have to be concerned about whether our blog content will work against us or for us when it comes to looking for a job.

For me, however, the discomfort usually passes and I come back and begin to think of the positive ways I can use my blog, the ways in which it can be a positive tool, even if it is just for myself and nobody else. I'm just here. For no other particular reason than to live outloud.