(with a nod, of course, to The Liminal Librarian…)
I’m hardly the first to notice that the boundaries between on-the-job life, professional life, and off-work-entirely life can be decidedly fuzzy. Sure, CavLec’s a personal blog where I talk about whatever’s in my brain at the moment that’s fit for worldwide dissemination (much being unfit therefor, of course). But just look at the last couple months’ posts—almost entirely profession-related. What can I say? I get obsessive about these things, and CavLec has become a highly convenient soapbox rather in spite of itself.
This leads, however, to some tricky social/professional negotiations. It might seem obvious that an existing blogger is the choice to head up a library’s blogging initiatives—but what if that blogger is profane, coarse, prone-to-fly-off-handles me? What library wouldn’t think twice? Even though I believe I’ve demonstrated to MPOW’s satisfaction that I know where the appropriate boundaries are, the mere fact that CavLec is a hybrid beast creates perfectly legitimate worries about whether I’ll forget in future.
Moreover, what happens if I say something professionally, socially, or politically beyond the pale here? Is MPOW obliged to take notice? Is MPOW obliged to take action? What about any professional societies I happen to belong to? Remember, CavLec is theoretically and actually my space—but I’ve assuredly muddied the waters by talking shop here; CavLec is a liminal space, sprawled over both sides of the personal/professional fence.
Restricting ourselves to the biblioblogosphere just for a moment, I note a range of responses to this difficulty. The purely professional blog, written in purely professional voice, as the blogger’s unique public face is perhaps the most obvious, because it is the easiest and most welcomed. Nearly all biblioblogs about open access take this approach, though the degree of editorialization varies from almost-entirely editorial to link-and-comment to just links.
Other bloggers split their blogging between professional and personal blogs. Still others (among whom I place myself) split between public blogging and (semi-)private blogging, often at a site that offers access controls such as Vox or LiveJournal.
The problem gets harder, though, in spaces less obviously bounded and more obviously social. Some listservs. Wikis. IRC channels: the DSpace developers’ list just got all in a tizzy about maybe logging the #dspace channel to the Web. LiveJournal communities (as opposed to individual journals). Second Life.
DSpace decided not to log its IRC channel. Two reasons were offered: first, that much of the chatter is just that, and second, that open conversation on the channel would be chilled by the awareness of logging. To my mind, the presence of ephemeral chatter and the fear of bright lights paint the IRC channel as a liminal space, between the personal and the professional.
Clearly separating personal from professional spaces makes life easier for everyone; employers can genteelly ignore the personal, while employees can extract whuffie from the professional, and since the line is roughly the same as in regular non-virtual space nobody’s expectations are violated and nobody’s nose has to go out of joint. Why do I have a LiveJournal? Because I force enough noses out of joint as it is; I’m all for MPOW not even seeing a few things, rather than forcing themselves to genteelly ignore them!
The thing is, the whole “genteelly ignore behavior in liminal spaces” model is at best a figleaf and at worst an illusion. As a professional librarian, I can’t ignore liminal spaces. Can you? Does all the information you need come to you through the strictly professional literature? Really? Do you feel not the slightest twinge of worry about your service population turning to liminal spaces for their information needs? (Then you’re the weirdest librarian I know. Google sprawls over all sorts of spaces.) Have you not even once considered how to place your library within liminal conversation spaces? (Again, if you haven’t so much as considered it, I wonder where you’ve been the last two-three years.)
I don’t agree with and am actually rather disappointed by all the WTFing surrounding Second Life and its library. Liminal online social spaces can become or be made professionally relevant. Without experimentation, how can we tell which are up-and-comers and which are flashes in the pan? Notably, experiments in making liminal spaces professional typically happen when professionals come upon, use, and become attached to the space in their non-professional lives. It’s no surprise Second Life librarians were Second Lifers first, or that IM reference tends to get pushed by avid IMers, or that library wikis get started by existing wikifolk; how could it be any other way? So a Second Life Library is a good idea because some librarians are already Second Lifers and are interested in pushing the space further toward librarianship. No other justification necessary.
But the transition from purely-social to liminal space carries costs in freedom of behavior. If there were a common, well-understood code of conduct surrounding liminal spaces, we’d be all right, even if that code was implicit. But there isn’t, and friction is flaring up all over the place. Consider the black eye Second Life Library got over at Rochelle’s because one SLL advocate brought Usenet-style social flaming into a professionally-toned discussion.
Consider my wholly graceless departure from #code4lib; consider the reasons I left, and especially consider them in light of an understated but genuine movement to consider #code4lib and similar spaces vital parts of library technology advancement. (For those who joined late: several behaviors that are accepted in IT spaces either don’t fly at all in librarian spaces or turn off people who would otherwise be useful parts of the conversation. Further deponent sayeth not except in archives.)
These are hard problems. I’ve been bitten more than once, and I wonder if anyone hasn’t by now. We can’t shut our professional selves out of liminal spaces; we impoverish both ourselves and the profession thereby. We can’t expect to treat them as purely personal spaces, either, which means a lot of unpleasant uncertainty and second-guessing, as well as regret; we all behave badly sometimes, and it’s frustrating to see venues where folks used to cut us a little slack turn into the same guarded, buttoned-down places we used the slacker venues to escape from.
At least we can talk about it. We can do that.
