Caveat Lector

Someone or other pointed me to this article on the dearth of academic-librarian bloggers. On a similar theme, I’ve gotten a number of congratulatory emails containing the plaintive refrain, “I hope you don’t stop blogging!”

So, is there something in the water fountains in university libraries that inhibits blogging behaviors? Inquiring minds want to know.

Part of the problem with the article, to my mind, is that the author clearly isn’t interested in academic librarians who just happen to blog. He jokingly tosses off (sorry) a couple of blogs whose subject matter is, er, not work-safe, but it isn’t until later that his real issues become evident: “But very few of his suggestions were quite what I had in mind — that is, public spaces devoted to thinking out loud about topics such as the much-vaunted ‘crisis in academic publishing.’”

Well, golly gee. I’ve certainly never talked about that before. Never. Not once. Uh-uh. Nope. No way, nohow. Nothing here. Negatory.

I’ve run out of synonyms for “no,” but I’ve still got links!

Sure, I wasn’t an academic librarian at the time (and, strictly speaking, I’m still not). I’m not sure there’s a “puzzling silence,” though, even so. I think closed ears might be part of the issue.

I will venture to predict that CavLec won’t ever make anybody’s academic-librarian blogger listings. Why not? Well, for one thing, it’s jocular in tone even when discussing professional issues; I can actually write in professional and scholarly registers, but you’d never guess that from CavLec. Academic librarians tend to share with their patron base a certain distrust of jocularity.

As was pointed out in comments to the article, academic librarians already have venues for serious writing about their fields, and a lot of them must use those venues if they want to keep their jobs. An academic librarian on the tenure track has to publish, just like any other tenure-track university position. Heck, I’m going to have to publish too, and my institution doesn’t even have tenure for librarians! (Longer time between contract renewals, yes. Tenure, no.) So if our author wants to find academic-librarian discourse, he’s going to have to embrace the jocular.

For another thing, CavLec isn’t a blog about academic librarianship, which is what our author seems to want to the exclusion of all else. CavLec is a blog about me, and I’m not just a soon-to-be academic librarian. I’m a geek, and I’m an ex-graduate-student, and I’m housemonkey for a couple of cats, and I’m a vegetarian, and I’m other things too. Which makes it easier for folks like our author to pass over the academic-librarianship bits. (Hint, though: if you’re a news-aggregator junkie, I’ve got a feed specifically for librarianship-related posts.)

Huge, huge gender issue lurking here. Huge. Colossal. Speaking in generalities, one-issue blogs tend to be written by men, while grab-bag, sui generis blogs like CavLec tend to be written by women. Counterexamples, yes, many—but it does mean that some people get excluded from particular discourses because they refuse to let that one discourse swallow up their entire written selves.

Which leads to what (if anything) will change about CavLec. I’m not going to blog at work; even if that were professional behavior (which it generally isn’t), I don’t expect to have time. I daresay I’ll blog about work in much the same ways I always have: stories good and bad from the long-buried past, good things about my current situation, plenty of grumbles about computers, the occasional human-foible post, and a hefty amount of poking fun at myself. The negative stuff, such as it is (and I don’t expect that much, honestly; I’m a positive worker in general, and I’m exceptionally pleased by the inter-employee relations where I’m going), won’t be shared with world plus dog. That’s only right and proper.

I’ll still blog about issues in librarianship; CavLec is where I think a lot of them through. I’ll also publish elsewhere about issues in librarianship, naturally in a markedly different tone of voice. But, see, that’s the thing: if you want journal-level writing about academic librarianship, go read journals.

Me, I’m just a blogger.