I got to lead a book talk this week. That is something that I've never done before. What possessed me to do such a thing? Well, it wasn't about a specific book, or even books at all. It was about blogs. I am in a book club with other assistant managers and we traditionally talk about library/management books. It got to the point once where the authors of these books seemed too far removed for practical application. It wasn't all of them; just a couple. This got me thinking about actual application to our jobs and how blogs may be a neat topic to cover for one month. I found that many bloggers are in the profession, and suffer the same workplace ailments that I do; that other library managers do. Often times these bloggers can be related to more easily (you like that proper grammar?). This may be because they seem like real people, or because they talk about issues in the way I talk about them. As I told the group on Thursday, I feel like I do belong to something. It's also comforting to know that, even though my library has some quirks and differences, a lot of libraries operate similarly and deal with the same issues. It's a sort of online camaraderie.
These are some of the blogs that were mentioned:
bossladywrites.com (authored by the brilliantly snarky & adorable @winelibrarian)
Practical Librarian (the nitty gritty on a lot of common library... things)
Genealogy Decoded (obviously for Genealogists, but a plethora of useful information)
In the Library with the Lead Pipe (2012 General Library Blog Winner and a very scholarly in-depth blog)
Annoyed Librarian (though the consensus was that he is markedly less annoyed since Library Journal acquired the blog)
Librarian In Black (hadn't updated in a while, but she's back)
Screwy Decimal (2012 Quirky Blog Winner, and yes, she is that quirky)
Prison Librarian (a great blog that will cause you to really think outside of what you might think a library does, it also gives some amazing, and sometimes sad, statistics)
A Librarian's Guide to Etiquette (playing up the sarcasm and relating to their readership by injecting humor, a nice place to take a break from the grind)
Each person chose a different blog, and from those different blogs, we had some great conversation, even if we went off-topic. I wonder if other people out there feel the same way. Books or blogs when budding in a profession...
