Knowledge managers roar in the US

... and are merely whispering in Au?  If you view the library/information world from a blogging/RSS viewpoint, it's certainly dominated by US-centric library peoples.

Granted, when you're talking online stuff, you're talking US-centricity.  They've got the sheer population to support it, and they have this tendency to be militant about the stuff they care about.

Aussies are by stereotype more laid-back, less militant, and less verbose about things that twitch their nerves.  So we're under-represented in blogs/RSS in general, and library/RSS blogs in specific.  There are a few and I'll name names when I'm not blogging on a work computer, but given the fact I can find one new US-based library blog a day merely by following up thought trails in existing blogs, but have yet to find a new Australian blog, even resorting to Google etc for help, is sort of indicative.

Do we need more bloggers?  Do we need more commentators, more people to clip and resource and feed, more people to try and read just to keep up with things? 

Well, yes, I think so ... the world is still a physical place and geographic location still makes a difference; and therefore having Australian voices in the infosphere will be important.

What I'd love to see is ALIA's voices.  ALIA has lovely RSS feeds for its official site stuff, but unless I'm not looking hard enough (it's feasible; I'm still new to this whole thing) then they're being too ... mature?  Sophisticated?  Overworked? ... to contribute their personal voice to the "Noise, please!" Voice Of The Librarian On The 'Net (VOTLOTN??!).

Thing is that librarians, as any number of people have said, are the guardians, the gatekeepers, the portals, the sorters-and-finders, of information.  We should have been shaping the 'net 10 years ago ... one of the reasons I got sucked into the IT world was because of a lack of IT in library areas, and because I chose the path of least resistence to follow my own druthers in the area.

That's changed now ... libraries are IT-enabled.  Librarians have to know how to kick printers and show patrons how to use Google.  More importantly, they need to show patrons why taking everything you find in the first three hits on Google verbatim is a Very Bad Thing and should get you a Very Low Mark on your school (or, worse, Uni) assignment.

So librarians/information managers/knowledge managers/etc et al should be online.  In numbers.  And in every country.  Ask Your Librarian.com should be a central website, a library without walls, where we teach the patrons of the 'net how to search effectively.  (Sadly, it's a parked domain and so out of reach.  But there are other options and maybe they exist, if only I'd look for them ... ).

The infoaddict task for today - find a bunch of non-US-centric library/information blogs and sub to them.  (Note - I love my US librarians, don't get me wrong.  They make me laugh and smile and nod knowingly.  But I do love a global view ... ).

(The infoaddict task for the month; actually add some links back into posts ... ).

Comments

[Infoaddict]

Greetings peoples! Hey Deb, we can't ALL possibly be huge CEOs and so on. I'm certainly not - not the least because having come back from several years in the IT world, I'm starting more or less at the saltmines of the Library world - direct patron queries. And it's the saltmine librarians who have the most to say about what our patrons (I dislike using "customers") want, how they perceive us, how they use the resources we supply and how we respond to their requests. It's the "saltmine librarians" who are on the cutting-edge and are pushing change in their workplaces for the simple reason that they won't survive without it (because libraries don't make obvious money and so are under constant threat of closure - that's a rant for another time, of course :) ).

But I agree - many of the ALIA lists are, these days, less chatty and more formal than in the past, and it can be hard to start a conversation. Blogs are filling the holes that the early mailing lists used to fill, before they started becoming "official" and formal.

Just this morning I was contacted by a librarian in Queensland, who wants to use blogging software internally for announcements of new stuff. I wonder if blogs will head the same path as mailing lists, and be in their turn replaced by yet another version of the chatty bulletin board that has been around as long as paper and writing?

[Ivan Chew]

Hi InfoAddict, totally agree that librarians (not just libraries) have to establish our presence online. The trick, it seems to me, is not to just tell them this but to show them some outcomes of librarians blogging. I showed my colleagues what people are saying (via blogs) about their libraries -- stuff they don't hear from the users direct. Also showed them the comments & mails I've received from librarians and non-librarians who dropped by my blog (what really blew them away were a few emails asking "what does a librarian do? I wonder if I can be a librarian".

Deb - some other librarian blogged something to this effect: "In the online world, nobody knows how small you are". :)

[Deb]

I have always felt a bit intimidated to post comments to ALIA lists (and so I never have) - I freely admit that I suffer from a chronic inferiority complex regarding fellow librarians who are the CEOs of huge library systems, have probably held office in ALIA or other professional bodies, organized gigantic conferences, and won a number of awards and/or submit regularly to academic journals (none of which I have or am ever likely to achieve because I am too busy/happy being a career small town librarian) and I wonder if they would really welcome my (very) humble opinions...Blogging is liberating in that it seems to lack a class structure inherent in more formal professional networks(whether real or merely the figment of my paranoid mind). And it's a lot more personal, which is maybe uncomfortable for some...

[CW]

Hi from Perth WA :) Good question! I've been pondering it too. Talking to my colleagues most of them either say "yes I've heard of blogs, but... [I can't see how they are relevant to anything]" or "how on earth would I have the time to start one?" Perhaps it's just a matter of time, seeing as things seem to happen more slowly in our part of the world.