Meredith has a great post about the how and why of blogging about work at Information Wants to be Free. I like her criteria for what is acceptable to blog - borrowing the concept of the “teachable moment” from training, she says that one should only post what is not detrimental to others and what serves to provide insight to others.

I’ve been thinking about a “what I blog and why” post for a while, but Meredith’s post has said pretty much what I wanted to say. My rule in general is that I “don’t blog about work”. I blog about the profession, about general issues that apply to many libraries, and the occasional reference to events or things I’m learning; but not about specifics of what I do every day. I do feel the need to have a separation between blog and work, just as my personal life and work lives are separate. That said, my organisation is pro-blog so it’s not that I’ve made a choice based on that.

On another note, those who’ve been following the blog for a while may have noticed that I’ve been posting about academic libraries more often lately. I left SBS before I went to the US and on my return to Australia I started working in an academic library. I am enjoying my new job immensely. This is the kind of job I really wanted when I went to library school. Not that I didn’t enjoy working at SBS, I did and I learnt a lot there, but what I’m doing now seems to align more closely with the vision I had of my place in the profession a long time ago.

Lastly, I have a confession to make - I am a crafty librarian. I’ve decided to start uploading photos of projects to my Flickr feed because I was starting to feel that my life was getting a little unbalanced and that perhaps my love of libraries was becoming unhealthy. Typical weekday routine lately has been to get home, check feeds, read table of contents from latest journals, spend an hour researching some new obscure article idea, have chats about libraries with friends on IM. Too much. People other than librarians read this blog (like my brother) and I’d like to keep them up to date too. There won’t be too many changes here, just the occasional “look at this thing I spent a lot of money and time making!” post.