Musings about librarianship is 10 years old! Looking behind the curtain....
Yes, I made it. 10 whole years of blogging about librarianship.
It has been a long road and it's hard to believe 10 years on I'm still here blogging.
If you are curious, this is the posts that started it all , 10 years ago in 2009!
My very first blog post on my old Wordpress platform
Looking back it seems incredibly long ago. I was then a very new librarian with over a year of experience, very much wet behind the ears.
Why did I even start blogging? It's hard to perfectly recapture what I was thinking at the time , except that I remember starting a Twitter account in 2008 and playing with the then trendy "Library 2.0" tools such as library widgets & toolbars which also naturally to the idea of blogging.
But I held back for various reasons until 2009. At the time, I was having a tough time due to some personal setbacks and decided to instead throw myself into work and throw caution to the wind and start blogging. The rest is history.
On my 10th blog anniversary, I'm going to indulge myself and talk about how the sausage gets made so to speak. Some of you might find this intriguing but for those who are not, let me thank you for your continued readership for however long you have been reading and I will see you in the next blog post!
For the rest of you , I invite you to walk down memory lane with me....
The blogger begins
To put in some context , in 2009, we were near the tail end of the "Library 2.0" craze, which included library toolbars, social media and of course blogging. Kathryn Greenhill put 2007-2008 as the peak of Libraryland blogging, so I was never part of that crowd and over the years, the number of active librarian blogs began to decline long before even Google killed off Google Reader
But this isn't a history of librarian blogging - Walt Crawford has you covered if you are interested if you are really interested (In particular see Cites and Insights September/October 2010) , so let me focus on my personal story.
I remember starting off at my then institution's Wordpress branded blog before quickly deciding to move to blogger.com. But for me it was never about the platform.
It was a way to express my ideas and as a record of what I was trying. At the time I seriously didn't expect anyone would pay any attention.
Looking back, I remember being particularly inspired by Guus van den Brekel the energetic and passionate Dutch Librarian at the Central Medical Library, University Medical Center Groningen who was blogging and sharing about library toolbars and widgets (Anyone remember Netvibes, Conduit toolbars, Libx?) who "infected" me with the desire to experiment and share.
Library Toolbar blog - one of the blogs by Guus that inspired me
Reactions to the blog
From the start I was surprised by the response to my blog posts. I was very proud that some of them made it to ALA Direct, was mentioned by NFAIS. OCLC etc and I was thrilled to receive compliments from people I looked up to including praise from Meredith Farkas , Jessamyn West . Beyond social media responses, because I tend to blog about some of the latest developments this blog also gets cited quite a bit in Google Books and Google Scholar.
This blog has also being listed in multiple best blog lists, and was cited directly as the reason I was nominated as a Library Journal Mover and Shaker in 2011. It goes without saying that award (which perhaps also lead to others following it) changed my life and my raised online profile and helped open doors for a otherwise perfectly ordinary librarian to be invited to give talks internationally.
Beyond that one of the nicest thing about blogging is when you get very nice sincere thank yous from readers (both online and in person when someone stops you in the conference hall to thank you) who tell you they benefited or were inspired by what you wrote. After all, knowing that what you do is making an impact is ultimately what everyone aspires to.
To this day I'm still a bit surprised by the things people say. Take this Tweet that was sent my way, seemingly out of the blue by Ryan Reiger . Ryan himself is now a library blogger .
I second that.
— Ben McLeish (@BenMcLeish) January 23, 2018
It's probably hyperbole but still very nice to hear.
According to Ryan, he encountered my blog during his MLIS days and based on what others tell me (backed by referrals to learning management systems), a surprising number of people encounter my blog posts first as a student.
I was initially thinking of doing an analysis of my email subscribers to have a feel of who I'm reaching but out of respect to the privacy of my subscribers I have decided against it. Still, I can see my blog is reaching not just Librarians but increasingly researchers and publishers (thanks to a couple of mentions on Scholarly Kitchen) who want an insight into what librarians are thinking.
Statistics - A reality check
Still, with all the accolades and praise it is important to realise that my blog is still very much a niche blog even compared to some of the top Librarian blogs in the past.
My Feedburner statistics - notice the plunge in subscribers in 2015 due to closing of Google Reader
I reached a peak of almost 3,000 subscribers (RSS and email) towards the end of 2014 before Google closing Google Reader caused my subscriber numbers to fall off a cliff. Today it has slowly risen back to over 1,500 subscribers (mostly via email).
These days, a lot of my views are generated via Twitter of course, Google Analytics listed a lifetime page view of 580k+ or roughly 150 page views a day.
Most posts hit 1,000 views after one month, popular ones hit 3,000 to 5,000. Then there are the top ones that go "viral" and get above 10k+ views. These are typically highlighted on online magazines with many eyeballs like ALA Libary Direct , Inside Higher Ed or Scholarly Kitchen or are of general interest beyond just academic librarianship.
An example would be my posts on Google Scholar. They tend to be very popular (20k+ views) and continuously draw views via Google.
When I first started using Google Search Console, I was surprised by how high my blog ranked for many Google Scholar searches. For example, as you can see above, for the very general search "Google Scholar" I was within the top 10 on average!
I even have posts that hit 60K+ views - one of my oldest blog posts that talks about 5 methods of appending ezproxy strings to URL.
Of course, page views don't always correlate wth quality. If you are curious of what I consider my best impactful posts (maybe because I felt I was the first to express a certain unique insight, made a prediction that proved prescient, or simply explained a certain issue or concept beautifully) , you can check them out by topic in my "Best of Musings about Librariansips" list.
Time spent blogging - a labour of love
With 286 published blog posts, I roughly estimate this to sum to approximately 800,000 words conservatively and may be as high as 1 million words (I'm long winded). So yes this blog is very much labour of love.
It takes me usually 3 passes to complete a blog post. For the first pass, I tend to focus on getting words on the page and/or to get the main structure out, a second session to add in images and hyperlinks and a third final editing session. I would say at the minimum each blog post takes 6 hours to craft from start to finish.
Of course some posts are easier to write than others, for instance a "listicle" such as my last post - 5 games that promote Open Access pretty much wrote itself once I had the games in my Google Keep (see later).
Others I end up rewriting radically. For instance - "Why citation practices make no sense", was initially titled "4 practices in academia and librarianship that makes no sense" but eventually I found the citation practice section started taking a life of it's own and overwhelmed the other parts that it made sense to rewrite it to focus just on citation practices.
Other times, as I write I realize I have bit off more than I can chew and need more than one blog post to properly cover and explain the issue.
It also happens when I try to write on an issue I don't really fully understand not only will I spend more time on it, often I end up abandoning the post in a draft until I feel better understand it or I have a different spin on it. Sometimes I have posts that will never see the light of the day.
My drafts in Blogger
For example, I have a 2,000 word post articulating my thoughts on the usefulness (or lack of) on Linked data for libraries that has been around for 3 years because I'm not convinced I really understand it. Part of it is I have recently decided I needed to write a blog post on Wikidata first.
Why do I blog?
So far I've mentioned how blogging has benefited me by raising my profile and the satisfaction I get from hearing that my work has been helpful to others. But I think that only tells part of the story, after all I began all this before I knew my blog would be widely read.
I have been thinking about this for a long time and I think I figured it out.
I don't have an explict philosophy of librarianship but if I do have one it is around the lines of the importance of being informed and truly understanding what we are dealing with to have the best chance of making the right decision to serve our users.
As such I put a premium on learning - by reading and trying , and importantly the need to deeply reflect on the issues at hand. Can you explain "what you know" by explaining it simply to another librarian who knows nothing about the area ? Can you point to the fundamental roots of disagreement between opposing views? Do you have a mental model on what are drivers of usage of a new service you are launching (and are smart enough to revise it based on feedback)? Given a new novel problem, do you have a broad enough base of knowledge to know roughly how to attack the problem or at least know who to ask?
In short, are you eager to drink to drink from the fountain of knowledge to get prepared or panic when change is forced on you and try to keep afloat with superficial understanding.
Blogging helps me by making me really think about what I think I really know. That was the original purpose of the blog back before I even thought there people would be interested.
As the saying goes, if you can't explain something to someone you don't really understand it.
As such I try to write in a way that even if you were a librarian with no knowledge of that area, reading my summary you would walk away not an expert but at least understanding the gist of what I'm writing about. My posts Understanding Federated identity, RA21 and other authentication methods and Understanding the implications of Open Citations - how far along are we? are the clearest examples of such posts.
I don't always succeed of course because the 'mental distance" is too far for some readers as they lack concepts I take for granted or worse I get it badly wrong.
Where I get my ideas for blogging
I notice readers and fans of my blog tend to ask me one of two questions. Where do you get your ideas on what to blog? How do you have time to read or keep up with so much?
The thing is I have a "secret weapon".
I don't know how it is for other bloggers, but in truth is for me my blog posts are often a reflection of the community I'm embedded in. Many of the ideas of my blog post can be traced directly or indirectly to something someone said in a Library Society of the World (LSW) or Twitter discussion that inspired me to blog. Other times I would try out a line of argument and the discussion around it helps sharpen my thoughts on the issues around it.
If "Musings about Librarianship" is the blog where my current thinking of a subject is displayed, LSW and Twitter are forums where my thoughts are first shaped and crystalized.
Twitter needs no introduction but many of you may not have heard of LSW which first orginated on the Friendfeed platform.
Me on FriendFeed (via Wayback Machine)
Friendfeed is now no more but it was where I found my community - "The Library Society of the World" (LSW). I was not early enough to have pioneer status and remember the days of Meebo chatrooms, but it was where I learnt and continue to learn from the astonishingly knowledgable and generous gang at LSW. (I would add Librarians weren't the only people on Friendfeed, it was quite a diverse crowd , in particular I interacted quite a bit then with pre-Mendeley/Elsevier, William Gunn!)
LSW on Friendfeed - via Wayback Machine
LSW is like a super think tank where I shamelessly ask for help in new areas that I'm studying or thinking about. For example, I remember back in 2010, I was trying to learn about Openurl resolvers and everyone was so helpful, in particular I remember Walt Crawford sending me some documents explaining how Openurl works, though he apologised that it was not the most up-to-date. I found it very helpful neverthless.
It's hard to describe how amazingly easy it is to look like you know a ton if you have a ton of experts in almost every conceivable area of librarianship and beyond to call on for advise.
It's only a small exaggeration to say at that most of my professional knowledge and expertise can be traced to Twitter and LSW. Twitter is where I get to know what interesting things people are reading and LSW is where I went to discuss things in depth things I was thinking about after I have read them.
The number of people in these communities whom I are indebted to over the years are too numerous to list. So I will just say this , thank you my LSW and Twitter people for the exchange of ideas and downright schooling me when I hold foolish or ignorant opinions, in a way you are all co-authors of this blog.
Conclusion
Conclusions have always been the weakest part of my writing and this blog post is no exception.
10 years is by no means a short time to devote to any one undertaking. It's funny how one spur of the moment decision to blog 10 years ago in March 2009 has led to this.
I know some of you have been reading my blog for years (maybe even from the beginning), I sincerely thank you for being with me on this journey and I hope to continue for many years to come.