Musings about librarianship turns 8 with a refreshed layout and a quick note!
8 years ago in March 2009, I started blogging about librarianship on a WordPress system powered by Edublogs Campus.
But very quickly, I moved to a personal Blogger site with the clunky tagline "keeping track of interesting and cool ideas that might be used by libraries for benefit of users" (I was really into playing with RSS and other similar tools at the time) and remained blogging there to this day.
Since then, I have blogged over 250 times. At an average of 4-8 hours per post (possibly an underestimate) for thinking and writing, I estimate I spent around 1,500-2000 man-hours on producing the content here. In return, while not hugely popular, the blog has generated a respectable 1.6 million page views and has a niche audience with over 1,500 email and RSS subscribers in the profession and industry.
Sincerely thank you all for your interest & support.
A revamped blog layout
I've always worked more on content then formatting (a weakness of many librarians), so my blog layout has had that ancient blogger template for the longest time.
In honor of the 8th anniversary of my blog, I've updated it to the slightly more modern "Dynamic views" template offered by blogger. I've set the default to be Magazine view, though you can use the drop down menu to change to other layouts, such as the classic view, flipcard view, mosiac view, sidebar view, snapshot view and timeline view)
New revamped Dynamic layout- with Magazine as default
Old blog layout
I'm sure you agree the dynamic view is much cleaner and exposes more content.
Improvements to search and browsing my blog
The older blog layout had other problems besides aesthetics. If you just discovered my blog and wanted to look for posts written by me on particular topics, it would be pretty difficult beyond going through my blog posts in chronological order.
For example, users have given feedback over the years to me that my blog's search box has been malfunctioning and that's it hard to check to find content written by me on particular topics.
This issue has been fixed now in the new layout, so you can happily search for any keyword in the top right box to look through 250+ posts.
Search by keyword for matching blog posts
I've also invested hours, trying to standardize the labels/tags of all my blog posts, so you can slice content by tags.
In the new layout , you can filter by labels by clicking on the tag icon on the extreme right and choosing the tag you want to use.
Browse by labels for matching blog posts
Try filtering to posts written by me on discovery, open access, marketing, social media, information literacy , analytics , mobile etc.
Even if you have followed my blog posts religiously for years, I encourage you to give this a try, you may be surprised at what you find.
In many cases, when you read them by topic, you can see a clear evolution in my thinking on say discovery over the years via my blog posts.
If you are fairly new to my blog, you should definitely browse or search for material of interest, I tend to revisit the same topic from many angles as my thinking on a subject evolves, over time it's rare I write only one or two posts on a given topic.
Of course, do let me know what you think of the new layout.
The future
Beyond changes to the layout, content wise not much will change. I have always had an eclectic range of interests in different areas of librarianship, and I will continue to blog about the trends in librarianship that catch my interest.
I am planning some guest blogging and interviews but beyond that it will be status quo.
On a personal note, I'm often asked why I blog or equivalently how I find the time and whether I will continue.
It's a fair question. I myself have sometimes wondered if all the time and effort on blogging could be better used elsewhere, particularly as many librarian bloggers have stopped in the last 8 years reasoning that their efforts and abilities can have a bigger impact in other areas. But then again, we are all different with different talents and inclinations.
Today it goes without saying my blogging has opened many career opportunities for me. It's has increased my online professional reputation and presence, opened doors to speak at conferences and is often cited as a reason for awards I've received.
But when I first began in 2009 , I did not even dream that people would be interested in what I thought and wrote. Back then , as a fresh new librarian, I just used my blog as an outlet to pour out my new ideas and thoughts. It worked as my professional journal of sorts to record my investigations and hear myself think. Even today, when I explore new areas of librarianship, I find it extremely useful to blog as this gives me an opportunity to try to explain as clearly as possible what I have learnt and see if there are any gaps in my knowledge.
But as I said, I did not expect much of an audience. As such, it was extremely gratifying and admittedly a great ego boost to realize that many fellow professionals found my postings useful as well.
After all, we are librarians, and the feeling of having helped someone is what drives us.
Though my blog has never drawn many comments, I do get feedback in other ways.
In particular, it's always nice to hear from fellow professionals who come up to me in person at conferences to say how my blog post on say Google Scholar helped them understand something, or they email or tweet at me saying that my blog post on something we implemented, inspired something similar at their place of work , or even comments that my posts give people lots of food for thought etc.
I don't want to oversell how much impact my writing has on librarians who read my posts, but such comments and feedback that I receive is what partly gives me the motivation to continue blogging. So, thank you all for that.
Thanks again all for reading and supporting this blog. Whether you just discovered this blog this year, or for those of you who have followed it from the very start, I value your readership.
You motivate and inspire me to plug away on my blog for hours to share what I know and make librarianship better for all.
Yours sincerely
Aaron