So, April 2008 is hardly the cutting edge of library blog frenzy… In fact the world, wife and dog started and got bored of blogging before I had even thought about signing up for my wordpress account. It was just one of those things that I never felt any urgency to start although I really enjoyed reading other blogs and am, in fact, the self professed Queen of RSS and my best friend is Señor Bloglines. (though our relationship has cooled slightly. More later.) The urge to write just didn’t hit me till I sat in that conference room and realised that no, no-one there had much more of an idea about e-collections than I did. Not that I have much more of an idea.

However, in my current job, in a small special library of 8 or so, by virtue of my relative youth and recent education experiences, (as well as obvious interest), I started gaining more and more of a carte blanche to “electronically” modernise the very tired and late 90s workplace. In my previous job as part of a HUGE library, work was much more strictly delineated into departments (reference does not mix with the web team etc.) However, in the communal atmosphere of the special library I realised that I would have a lot of flexibility to introduce new ideas- and so my blog reading really started to ramp up as I began to become more interested in how I could contribute to the mini library revolution… As I read more and more of the minor techy blogs and started to see what other people were up to, I realised that the blog was probably an ideal way to record the progress of musings, experimentations and thoughts about a subject, to throw a different perspective on the issue and finally, to become part of the community of like minded people. Everyone in my place of work (apart from the Systems Librarian) grew up with card indexes… I have never even opened a drawer of a card index except when I interned at the Library of Congress, and even then I shut it quickly, and hoped that the tour librarian wouldn’t see me pull a face. Yes, I understand the great part that it played in the History of the Library, blah, blah, but this is a practical blog, remember So, yes, when I started reading all these inspirational library blogs, I realised that yes, there is a new library generation, and hey, I like! The jury is still out on whether I will ever contribute anything useful to the new generation- but maybe if I ever stop talking about myself, I will have a better shot.

Upward and Onward!