LibraryTechtonics

I must say, my friend Jeanne is a one-woman ideation agent of brilliance. Talking to her is like seeing all of the idle-yet-interesting thoughts that sit in the back of your brain somewhere come to life in a burst of motivation and possibility. I’m terribly, wonderfully excited that Jeanne is currently in library school, since we need more of her ilk in our profession.

One of the niftiest parts of talking to Jeanne about library stuff is that we share a specific flavor of technology experience, one that includes coding and shell access and database planning and information architecture and all sorts of dirty techie fun. In a lot of ways, being techies in our first lives then librarians in our second lives gives us a sort of enhanced uberpatron outside-looking-in approach to librarianship, as well as steeped-in-culture view. We see inherent possibilities where librarians of other specialties may not because of the way our brains are programmed to think, as well as because we love libraries so much that we don’t want to see them go into the ground like a freakin’ dart.

I had the privilege of hanging out with my friend Jeanne this past weekend, and boy did we *talk*. Thinking back on our conversations over the past few days, I see a few of the stumbling blocks I’ve been experiencing lately in my blogging in a new and different light. I feel like I don’t know my readership well enough, and since not everyone moves at the speed of technology, so it’s hard to figure out whether or not it’s “too late” to post something due to lack of relevance, or whether or not it’s something that everyone already knows, where I’d be beating a dead horse. I know I’m good at piecing things into bite-sized chunks (or so my patron/students insist), but I don’t feel like I have a good enough sense of what constitutes bite-sized for my readers. I’m not trying to make or shape a readership niche, I’m trying to understand better my readership niche.

Jeanne gave me lots of great feedback and ideas. I realized that it was feedback that I craved, and now I have a really firm, new sense of going in the right direction. I’m definitely going to incorporate some of her suggestions, schemes, and comments in my bloggage (and she gets full credit for being the greatest librarian muse *evar*), but because it’s all so big and wonderful, I need to make bite-sized chunks of my own to get it going, but I definitely won’t be afraid to go beta and just start tossing it out there. And, any feedback you might have is heartily encouraged and appreciated.

Tags: librarianship
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