cpd23 – the first three things

Things 1-3 are:

1) Create my own blog.  Check, if you’re reading this, you’ve found the blog version of me!

2) Explore other blogs.  Check.

I do have a few words to say about the exploration of other blogs.  I have been following several amateur crafter blogs for a while now and have found them enjoyable, enlightening and inspirational.  I have used them to inform my own practice, I’m looking at you Scruffy Badger and the recommendation for the Martha Stewart scarflette.  Now, I ask myself, why is it that I don’t do the same in my professional life?  Is it because I have not yet come across anyone who writes engagingly on topics that spark my interest?

Led by search engine serendipity I have now found a few ‘library’ blogs that I like for their tone, content and scifi references (not exactly librarianly, but the truth none the less): libwig,  Organising Chaos, dark-side-of-the-catalogue and The Travelin’ Librarian.  But!  What to do now I’ve found some blogs that I like?  Wrestle with the Read Blogs tab on the free WordPress site that I am using, try to get them to feed new posts, not to my email, but to my blog??  This is very much ‘work in progress’…  will keep you posted!

3) Consider my personal brand.

This too I have struggled with.  Hmm…  what to write about and how, what am I trying to achieve?  How will this impact upon the name that I have chosen  and the look and feel of the blog.   Well, the name and the look and feel you can see.  I wanted clean, uncluttered, light, bright and open.  The name pennylibrarian sums up me and what I do.  The Internet is host to a couple of other pennylibrarians, penny the librarians and another UK librarian with my firstname and surname, but hey, I’m happy with the title, I don’t think that I am going to generate a mass following and be at risk of brand confusion 🙂

Now, the tone and content element of brand I’ve ruminated over for a week or so and have decided:

a) I don’t want to aim for ‘commentator’.  This seems the domain of the senior practitioner, the high-profile or the anonymous.

b) I am interested in using the blog as a central location for reflecting upon and recording personal (professional) development.

c) If a bit of crafting creeps in I think that is OK, my view is that the online crafting community is ahead of the online library/information community and there is much that could be applied from one to the other.  Try ‘Tilly and the Buttons‘ clore ‘Provocation Paper‘ for starters!