I said I’d do it. No one believed me. But the day has come, and I am one stubborn gal.
My seven-day-long interwebs free period begins in three hours.
I may resort to getting someone to hide my laptops, but the aim is to resist temptation, while temptation is in full site.
Wishing all a fabulously festive week ahead. See you on the flip-side (when I’ll either be highly strung and in desperate need of some net time, or totally chilled and ready to relinquish my gadgets).
danah boyd explains the rationale behind her forthcoming month-long email sabbatical. How refreshing to come back from holidays and not have to spend the first days/weeks catching up on email. If I was dealing with 500-700 personally addressed emails a day, I think I’d be doing the same (and I thought my current onslaught was overwhelming!).
Those of you who know me know I’m a chronic email checker / Twitterer / Facebooker / blog reader / yadda yadda… I own two laptops because my preferred laptop (a MacBook) is too big to throw in my handbag, have a mobile wireless connection for backup and have been known to check webmail on my mobile when my morning coffee stop is taking too long.
It’s nothing compared to a month of rejecting emails, but I’m aiming for a totally interwebs free week starting Christmas day. My phone will only be used for proper phone tasks – no surreptitious checking of anything – and my laptops will be gathering dust. It’s sad, but true, that I cannot remember a single day in the last five years where I haven’t been connected to the interwebs. No, wait. I think having my wisdom teeth out might have meant a web free day. But only one.
So, a disconnected week? Hmmm… It will be a challenge, but one that I’m looking forward to.
This weekend, I’m working on the bordering-on-mythological paper on mpow’s blog pilot. To that end, I’ve been trawling the interwebs looking for blog posts, articles… anything documenting libraries’ and the corporate world’s strategies for evaluating the success or otherwise of blogging projects. I’ve been trawling for a while, but I live in hope that it’s just my search skills letting me down, and I’m going to miraculously find the very article I need at the eleventh hour.
As I’ve lamented earlier, libraries are not publicly documenting their evaluations of blogging projects, which is a problem because it makes benchmarking near impossible. Sure, you can still come up with a bunch of metrics and work out a number for each, but how do you know if the number you’re getting it good or bad?
Luckily, through a serendipitous Twitter experience, I’ve managed to track down a couple of people who were willing to share their data. But I need more. More, I say!
Enter Walt Crawford’s Public Library Blogs: 252 Examples. I have to confess, I’ve been meaning to buy and read this book for ages. I finally did buy and read it today, and I wish I’d read it a while back. If you’re responsible for a blogging project, you need to read this study. Especially useful is the grouping of the examples by population served – this allows you to compare your library’s blog’s performance for key metrics against like-sized libraries. I think it’s also a useful tool in setting realistic expectations, especially when it comes to converstatinal intensity (or the number of comments libraries tend to get per post). I wish I’d bought this and shared it with our staff ahead of the pilot.
While Crawford didn’t have access to usage stats, this is still an incredibly useful book.
I do wish, though, that someone would go begging to the library community at large to supply site visits, page views, links clicked and a few other metrics besides, so that we could have a ginormous study alla Walt Crawford’s that includes the kind of statistics he unfortunately didn’t have access to. PhD thesis, anyone? Even to do it for a grouping of libraries (say, public libraries serving populations between 400,000 and 500,000 – obviously, my reasons are entirely altruistic) would be incredibly useful, and you could extrapolate for libraries of different sizes.
As an aside, I love that I can buy a book online and be reading it within two minutes. I wonder if publishers will ever sort out the DRM debate and get pricing right on eBooks so we can do this with anything we might want to read.
Right, enough procrastinating.
“I can tell.”
The Night Ferry by Michael Robotham.
Rules:
So I spent the last couple of days in Melbourne at NLS4. The New Librarians Symposium is a great biennial for new graduates to get together, present a first paper, hear from experts and have some seriously good times do some serious networking.
It was a chock-full program: 30 papers, 5 keynotes, a debate and a handful of other talks in two days. It was exhausting, and for the first time ever, I actually left the conference early and took an earlier flight home. The tiredness might have been made worse by the social program – which included a pre-conference drinks meet up (which a few of us followed up by a late, late, late dinner that kept us all awake half the night), a cocktail party and the conference dinner (which I skipped this time round) – and the fact that I managed to have a hotel room situated right on top of one of Melbourne’s most popular (and loudest) nightclubs. The music was great; it’s just that I didn’t particularly want to feel it vibrating through the floor and all the furniture at 2am after a long day of papers! Next time I book accommodation at the conference venue, I’ll be looking for reviews first.
Highlights of the conference for me:
Some non program highlights included dinner at a fabulous Italian restaurant on Thursday night, followed by dinner at my favourite Melbourne restaurant Cafe Zum Zum on Friday. Also a highlight was catching up with friends from afar – friends from uni, colleagues from my former pow, the people I get to see only on the conference circuit, and a whole bunch of new people.
The New Generation Advisory Committee (NGAC) is currently reviewing the future of the New Librarians Symposium and looking for feedback. If this is a topic close to your heart, check out the article in this month’s inCite, which outlines the four models we’ve come up with, then drop us an email with your feedback.
As for me, I think this will probably be my last NLS. I’m feeling a little like I’m at the end of my new grad-ness, and less like I identify with the issues that seem to be facing lots of new grads. I’m also stepping down as chair of NGAC as soon as new members have been recruited, so I can focus on a few other things in the year ahead. It’s been fun, but time to move on.
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