It can be so large and yet so small all at the same time. There are hordes of librarians and information professionals out there working in public, academic, government, and corporate institutions worldwide, yet I feel like I constantly meet the same faces in my journeys and hear the same names being bandied about.
We all attend the same conferences like American Library Association and Special Libraries Association, we listen to the same speakers like Mary Ellen Bates and Gary Price, we read the same blogs like Librarian In Black and Librarian.net, and we're all up on copyright and the Patriot Act thanks to sources like Library Journal that, naturally, we all read. Not to mention we're all using twitter and blogs and wikis and whatever other web 2.0 technology we cross paths with to to try and tame the information world!
With few exceptions, library bloggers take themselves very seriously offering tips, advice, and news to other information professionals, like me, who are too lazy to do it themselves. As a result, people worship the ground that they walk on! Only in the information world would the kids who were picked last in gym class be heralded as rockstars and flown all over the country for speaking engagements and presentations about technologies that all of us have access to.
We live in a culture that is obsessed with celebrities and the information world is no different.
These popular bloggers and info pro elite have reached an exalted status, yet they are as ridiculous as the people who hang off their every word. They're part of the unwashed masses, they just got a little noteriety.
As a librarian, I should probably be more concerned with facts and figures than rumors and conjectures but one of my guilty pleasures is reading blogs like Perez Hilton, PinkIsTheNewBlog, Jossip, and GoFugYourself that make no attempts to take themselves (or anyone else for that matter) seriously. They are entertainment - pure and simple - and there's very little out there in the library world that fits the bill to my own satisfaction.
This blog is an experiment and an attempt to look at the information world we work, live, and breathe and make fun of it. Because what else is there to do? Everyone has already talked about everything else and it's been done to death!
- The Gossiping Librarian
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