Dumpling in a Hanky

This post is a collaboration between @ijclark and myself, and is essentially a very rough outline of something that has been variously discussed between Ian, @ellyob and me. It is rough but we think it might be worth taking forward as an idea and we were hoping others could pitch in and help develop it, potentially bringing it to fruition. Ultimately, we need your input to help refine this idea and, perhaps, to help us get it off the ground. This information is also cross posted on Ian's Infoism blog. The Why As a librarian who worked in a commercial law firm, I was very sensitive to the fact that any public statements of opinion made by me, on any topic, could be interpreted by my employer or clients as a breach of my employment contract. This was especially true if they could be seen to contradicted my firm’s stance on certain sectors or were overtly political. This meant that I had to be careful not to involve myself online with any contentious issues, and had to restri...

5 candles on my blog birthday cake, on its fifth anniversary*! I've done quite a bit since I started this blog up: Chartered, (hopefully) Revalidated, been a Committee member, been a Convenor, organised training events, gone to training events, formally and informally mentored other information professionals (and been mentored by them in return), set up the UK Library Bloggers wiki, pottered about the edges of interesting projects like the Library Routes and Build India A Library initiatives, been involved in the setting up of various wikis for various purposes, taken part in a course of online study, attended formal conferences and informal unconferences (that is such  a horrible word!), and along the way, found a ton of entertaining book-related gifts on Etsy. In other words - good lord, I got professional! And it didn't even hurt! Keeping the blog going (despite long periods where I've thought "I really have nothing to talk about", or "I have loads to ...

I've been blog hopping! Using the cpd23 Delicious bookmarks , I've been having a wander around some participants blogs. I feel I already know certain bloggers reasonably well, so after a wander round their blogs, and some commenting, I branched out into other blogs....the blogs of STRANGERS!  I joined in on an interesting discussion in the comments of Libraries, the Universe and Everything , about what number of RSS feeds people feel is reasonable. Some people are certainly able to deal with a lot more feeds than me, although I suppose it's also not just the number of feeds, but the activity levels of each of those feeds that may be a factor in how many is "too many".  I have to admit though, I kind of lost track of where I had been, as I would click on the link of a blog commenter, then comment and follow a link to another comment on their blog...and forget to click the "send emails of following comments" option. D'oh! I also learned that find...

Yes, I feel all proud, because it's coming up to birthday-time for the UK Library Bloggers Wiki. ..it's toddling along nicely all by itself (with just the occasional spammer attack - it's really quite satisfying to get to ban and block people!), with people generally seeming quite happy with the process of adding their blogs themselves. Since I last looked in July 2010, there have continued to be additions in various categories.                                           July 2010                                        March 2011 Institutional bloggers              135                                                   ...

In the case of this blog, it's a name that had no particular thought or planning behind it - I had no idea whether I would actually want to keep it going, what I would blog about, or that anyone would ever read it. Well, it's almost 4 years later (17th June 2007 is blog birthday, if we're counting), and the blog's still here, so I think we can now safely assume that it's probably going to be sticking around. And the name's been getting on my nerves a bit...you have no idea the amount of people who have found this blog looking for ladies called Jennie Law or Jenny Law. Personally, I'm not actually called Jennie Law, so I'm no help to these poor searchers, although for the right fee I could maybe consider pretending to be... I also don't blog a huge amount about law: I'm not a lawyer, I just have the job of finding stuff for lawyers. Sometimes that process amuses me, sometimes it annoys me, and I blog about it. Sometimes I write about library is...

Well, 4 days after I’d been told my material would be taken off that site…it was still there. So I sent a further email saying if it was not removed immediately, I would be taking the matter up with their ISP (and many thanks to the peeps who commented, and gave me the info on how to do this if I needed to). And I got a reply: Hello, As we have informed you before, we remove the details. Don't worry. We have stopped updating this section about 2 years before. So we are checking the credentials of the articles section with design dept. Surely we will remove it shortly. Then, a follow up a few hours later: Please check it, its removed. And lo and behold, it is indeed gone…yay! However, all that other content from other people/sites, harvested in 2008 is still sitting there. But telling all those people is a bigger job than I can take on...

So, we unleashed the UK Library Bloggers wiki into the wild back in March, and crossed our fingers that it would be ok, out there in the Scary World, all on its own. And so far, it seems to be doing just fine, yay! There are of course the regular spammer attempts to "subtly" insert adverts for dissertation work, and all sorts of less...erm...wholesome products within the entries, but the email alerts about text amendments that go to the administrators of the wiki (Phil, Jo and I) means that the first person online and able to, goes in and removes that material and blocks the creator. This has worked really well so far, and unwanted content doesn't stay on the wiki for any real length of time. And the best bit is the librarians and info professionals who've been adding themselves to the wiki! I created a backup in March before we "unlocked" the wiki, and at that point there were 115 institutional / professional group blogs, 83 librarian blogs, 5 Chartership...

Yeeesh, it's been 2 whole years since I started building you out of the results of Google, Yahoo,Technorati and other random searches. Very quickly I realised that I couldn't bring you up properly on my own, so Auntie Jo , Auntie Christine , and Uncle Phil stepped in to help. Without them, you might have gotten a bit unruly, and grown up all scraggly and without any discipline. I think that together, we've done quite well, keeping you nicely in shape and making sure you're as well informed and as up to date as possible. And now that you're all grown up, we've realised that the time has come to set you free in the world, to let you make your own way, meet new people, make your own changes, grow and develop in ways we might not be able to help you with ourselves. So....we've unlocked you, and now anybody (who registers with PBWorks) can edit, update and add to you. We know it's a risk, but we think you're old enough now to be able to look after yourse...

I was pointed a while ago to this discussion on JISCmail a while ago, which I'm not a member of, so I couldn't respond to the discussion about library blogs (and to be honest, I couldn't be bothered joining to explain why the UK Library Bloggers wiki came from, and why it is as it is -it's all done in my free time). The point I took from it was that the UK Library Bloggers wiki wasn't regarded as comprehensive, and was seen to be inconsistent. As it's always a work in progress, I took that on board...and spent 30+ hours over the last few months going through each of the 800+ liblogs listed on the Hotstuff 2.0 list discussed in the JISCmail thread, and determining which were in the UK, and if they were missing from the liblogger list. From that, I found 37 new liblogs (and a lot which I would classify as dead, as they haven't had any posts in 2009, so I ignored), some of which were debateable whether they fell into the liblog definition (automated library...

So, a month or so ago* I did a trawl through all the institutional / professional group blogs on the UK Library Blogs wiki, checked that the ones I'd found before were still there, added any new ones I'd found, and added a new area on entries, for account information on those groups or professionals with Twitter accounts listed on their blog. I'm trying to do the personal blogs soon too, but with more work, less time to do it in, and my own life getting a bit busy, don't hold your breath for that to happen in the next few days! :) As always, if you're not on there (and that's quite likely, the Magical Interweb is a big place, with many nooks and crannies hiding things), contact me either via the 'contact owner' option on the wiki front page, or via the email cunningly disguised in the right hand sidebar here, and I'll add you as soon as I can :) *Oh, looks like it was a bit more than a month, more like two! Time flies!

I'm continuing to add to this list, as and when I can, and trawl through those already on the list to check for changes since the last visit / my mistakes in the collection of the initial list (my apologies to Neil Infield for accidentally renaming him to Ian!) Also, I received an email telling me to look at FADE Library 's great work on collecting UK health library blogs, which I will(with their kind permission) also add in to the overall list (and blog about in a later post) to try and make it as comprehensive as possible. Unfortunately, my email provider went squiffy and deleted the original email before I could reply, so I don't know who to credit for alerting me to this massive piece of work by the FADE staff, and also means their own blog details were zapped! If this was you, please can you get back in touch so I can add your blog, and say thank you personally!

A legal librarian friend forwarded me this event notification today from SIN, the Scottish Information Network . Unfortunately, I didn't get the notification myself (nor did at least one other member that I know of), despite having joined SIN back in April. I think they may need to look at their email /contact list management! Scottish Information Networking event - First steps in blogging Dear colleague Do you blog or are you thinking about blogging? The Scottish Information Network is running an evening event entitled “First steps in blogging” on Tuesday November 4th. Come along and hear advice from some real bloggers or perhaps even plug your own blog! The event will also be an opportunity to meet with other members of the network and find out more about what’s happening in the information world. See below for more details and let me know ASAP if you would like to attend John Coll Business Information Services Manager Scottish Business Information Service National Library of Sco...

Well, apparently, according to the recent Times article. The only problem is, Alex Wade doesn't seem to have bothered actually doing any proper research. They've decided that only staff at law firms are likely to blog, or have any knowledge of the law, thereby ruling out advocates / barristers, academic law professionals, support staff / librarians, students.... There are lots of law blogs out there, by all sorts of people working in the law, all it takes to find them is a few minutes! I randomly selected one of the blawgs listed in the article, and a quick look at some of Geeklawyers blawgroll lists the following: Bar Council Blogs Batgirl was a librarian Binary Law CharonQC Conflict of Laws Corporate Blawg Current Awareness Family Law Free Movement Head of Legal Human Law Impact IPKat Law Outsider Lawclanger Legal Beagle Legal Spy lo-fi librarian Martin George Open Content Lawyer Pink Tape PJH Law Publawyer Pupillage and How to Get It Ruthieslaw ...

Sarah Hammond, an MA student, is researching the world of UK library blogging, and is trying to compile a comprehensive list of UK public library blogs. She's going to post the results on Delicious, with the username Public_biblioglogosphere , and has kindly agreed to allow me to add the results of her work into the overall UK library bloggers wiki. She's also doing her dissertation on the UK biblioblogosphere, and has set up a survey for UK public librarians to fill in here , if they're feeling  nice. It should only take 10 minutes, and will give you an inner glow of happiness for being so lovely :D

...but I'm glad they did! The very fabulous Scots Law News blog has changed its layout. Now posts are dated, timed, and allow a link directly to each post. The content has always been very good, but being unable to see the date, or link directly to a specific post was frustrating for me - I imagine there were ways to do that, but they weren't obvious to a reader. Now, all is well in the world, and the posts are well linked to background material, making it easy to bring yourself up to speed if you've missed any related info they refer to! My only niggles are that I still can't find an RSS feed, so my little overloaded brain has to remind me to visit regularly, and I'm not keen on clicking a link to read a full story...I go to blogs to skim for info, not clicking into each post... But overall, well done SLN, and thank you for making reading it easier on the eyes :-)

In response to my original post about needing help to double check entries and add last visit dates for the UK Library BLoggers wiki, the lovely Jo and Christine have kindly volunteered to help out, yay!!! So, over the next wee while, we'll be revisiting all the blogs already on there, and checking the original quick synopsis is accurate, and adding in a date of last visit. In my meanderings last night I found that already, in the month since I'd first visited, one blog had shut down and moved to another address with a new focus, and a new university departmental blog had started...it's all go with us library bloggers! So thanks again to Christine and Jo for giving their spare time to help with this task!

...and I'm getting daily addition request emails (which is lovely!), I realise that there's a flaw in the data I originally collected. There's no "visit date", and for something as rapidly changing as blogs, that's not good - things may change quickly, and without a visit date, it'll be hard to know when things happened. So....anybody want to volunteer to take a trip around the blogs, check what I've written about them for accuracy, and email me with the date of visit / revised synopsis? No, thought not...guess what I'll be doing this weekend? Also, the line between "librarian" blogs, and "information professional" blogs is getting harder to draw. The list was set up to pull together all the UK library / librarian bloggers I could find. If people didn't say in their "About" section that they were a librarian, or worked in a library, or the blog was run by a library, they were excluded. So yes, this has ruled out gr...

In my traipse through the highways and byways of the interweb, looking for UK library and librarian blogs, I learned a few things about blogs in general, and UK library blogs. I'll try and make sense of it below... Blog Tips Have an “About” or “Profile” section easily locatable on your blog. Without this, it's like a book without a “blurb”: there’s no information to guide the reader on what to expect from you, and people may well get frustrated, leave and not return, regardless of how interesting your content is. Give people some idea of what you blog about. If you blog infrequently, it can take a fair amount of time for a reader to skim through multiple posts and get an idea of what you’re about. A tag cloud is very helpful to allow a reader to see at a glance what your main blogging themes are. Or sort your labels by order of frequency, so people can see what you most often blog about. Identify, if not who you are (if you want to blog fully or semi anonymously), then at leas...

As suggested, I set up a wiki for this list, to allow for easier updating and accessing. I'll be inviting a few others to co-author it, as many hands make light work! So, here's the address, come have a look: www.uklibraryblogs.pbwiki.com/ If you're on the list and would like to give yourself a better synopsis than I've managed, please get in touch either via the email here (in oh-so-cunning code on the right, below my profile), or via the link on the wiki. Also, if you'd like to be removed from the list too. Hopefully, we'll manage to get a nice comprehensive list together on there, and then get RSS feeds from all the listed blogs going...or something technical like that. Grown-ups are going to help me!