I’ve now been running this blog for eleven years. When it started my hair was mostly dark, and I could run a half marathon in under an hour and forty five minutes. Now my hair is grey and same distance takes me two and a half hours.
Time to take stock — posts have been infrequent, latterly, and mostly concerned with the tedious and difficult internal affairs of my professional association, CILIP. Much of the online effort that used to go into the blog now goes into Twitter; I also find myself contributing to more institutional online thingies of one sort or another. But I still think there’s a point to this blog.
It was a good moment, therefore, to attend a UKEIG course on Digital Communications, led by Ned Potter. While I took away many ideas on how to improve and focus what Brighton and Sussex NHS Library and Knowledge Service does online, it was not without relevance to the tools I use personally.
UKEIG courses, and their predecessor organisation, UKOLUG, have probably influenced my professional life more than any others. I well remember a searching Medline course I attended way back when, taught by Lindsay Curtis, then of the Royal Postgraduate Medical School, just before someone had the bright idea of putting databases onto CD-Roms.
I’ve also been thinking about podcasts, whose star rose, then fell and now seems to be rising again. I listen to a number, though I find many ill-disciplined and over-long. If I were to podcast, it would be terse, succinct. There is something of a gap in the market — there are few library podcasts, and the British one I listened to most, Talking with Talis,sank without trace, when that organisation, once a co-operative of libraries run by its members, wound up run by private equity and taken over by Capita. Perhaps there is room for regular recorded conversations on subjects of interest to this great profession of ours.