First Anniversary - Paper

Yesterday was the first anniversary of both my new job and my new blog.  Looking back at my postings (starting on January 1, 2012), I wanted to see what the pattern of my interests were.  Here are two Wordles created from my blog entries (split about mid-year):

^Through June, 2012^


^July-December, 2012^

They are quite similar, with the two most used words being "libraries" and "ideas".  Other common words include "circulation," "resources," "ebooks," "books," and "electronic."  I'm a little chagrined at the frequency of "rather" and "however".  Words that I expected to be more prominent were "value" and "collection".  However, "metrics," "model," and "measure" are pretty big.

I also looked back on my ideas that I was wanting to pursue, notably my "Top Ten Questions" and "What to Study Next".  Well, my eyes have always been bigger than my stomach, and I did not pursue a course of study in logic, epistemiology and professions.  I did, however, carefully read Ranganathan's Five Laws of Library Science (see postings), from which I had gained much insight into the history of librarianship.  My top questions, however, I think are still valid and worth pursuing, particularly those related to measuring the quality of a collection, and what impact the collection has on student learning and faculty research.

Ideas I imagine I will be pursuing over this next year include:

• Library Impact Data Project - they have a toolkit that I'd like to look into using
• Assessment in Action (ACRL)
• More thorough overlap analysis of A&I databases (for yet another round of budget cuts)
• Evaluation of accessibility of our resources for those who are print disabled

I also tried making a timeline from my postings using TimelineJS.  This was not as easy as I had hoped...But I got something interesting:


When I started this blog, I wasn't sure if it was something I could keep up.  I did not want to have a blog that laid fallow with rare postings.  Now that I know that I can write regularly, I need to decide if this is something that I want to continue doing.  And while I think it is perfectly valid to write for my own ear, my goal is to develop conversations and discussions.  While I want to contribute my voice, I would hope that others would want to listen.  So, I'm hoping to generate a little more interest in my work over the next year.