A Thing 4 addendum, as I’m burying my head in the sand regarding Thing 5. My 'current awareness' has gone to pot somewhat this week, as I've not been on Twitter at all prior to about an hour ago (some may claim that I envy those who are at #ub11 and excitedly tweeting about it; those people are silly poo-poo heads if they think I'm that immature).
A week on, I’m still using Pushnote to make note of interesting half-read sites which I may want to return to. However, it’s not grabbed me that well, and I probably will stop using it once I’ve caught up on the linked sites I currently have.
In similar thematic area to Thing 4, I have Google/Scholar alerts on my particular areas of interest (‘academic* liais*’ and ‘subject librarian*’), which I’ll periodically go through. These were set up to support the lit review for my dissertation in this area. Whilst they generally result in junk, occasionally something valuable turns up. I currently have over 100 alerts emails to read - they remain firmly stuck to the bottom of my to-do-list.
Finally, flicking through a Google Doc of half-baked thoughts which might one day become blogs, I came across a rambling rhetorical question. My RSS feeds featured several US librarians, as well as aggregated blog-feeds from some US academic librarians (email updates such as LJ Academic Newswire could also be lumped into a wider ‘US library landscape awareness’ blob), leading me to wonder thus:
Do [US librarians] have it better or worse than us; they are equally vocal, if not more so, but whilst they share common themes (budget cuts, risk of closure for public libraries, identity crises) they also have very different concerns (faculty/teacher status, state politics, guns on campus) which resonate less. Is it worthwhile to continue to maintain an international focus, or is this taking time which could be spent drilling down into local issues? Is it merely a pretence that LIS is the same beast worldwide, with fundamentally the same concerns and aims?
I remain undecided about this issue; I have found some blogs from US librarians to offer useful concepts which translate well, but others never really speak to my personal experiences. In practice, I now have less RSS feeds from US-library-centric sources. Have I narrowed my world-view, or made a conscious decision to focus on my own back yard?
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