Lawyers, writers and journalists were very visible at i blog. I'd like to think that librarians, to a lesser extent, were visible, too. And this presence at a "techie" event, I believe, bodes well for our profession.
In "Learning to Learn," Will Richardson says,
I'm going to bet that most bloggers who stick with it do so because they are fearless learners. We want to know more, push our thinking, exchange ideas. We have found teachers that inspire us and move us with their own intelligence or creativity or sense of possibility, and they teach us daily.Michael Stephens proposes substituting the word "teacher" with "librarian" in "Librarians Learning to Learn" and asks,
Have you found a librarian to learn from? A librarian blogger? A mentor in library school or in your library? Are we still learning to learn? Are our organizations still learning? I think some folks in libraryland may not be...and that scares me.
Well, there are librarian bloggers in the Philippines right now who are still learning to learn. There are enough of us that Rambling Librarian, a Singaporean, has come up with a list of "Liblogarians in the Philippines." Some of the following are on his list, some I met at i blog, and all I would like to meet someday at a blogging summit for librarians—assuming that we will continue to grow in number—so that we can learn from each other:
- Amy of KTS Library introduces herself in "Information Specialist. What?" by saying that, "We need to engage the world we are in and the generation that molds it."
- Mal’akh vows in "Stack Dreams" that, "I will make it a personal project of mine to make a calendar whose models were all librarians."
- Juned, who has eight blogs, writes in library7 about how his work as an abstractor affected his reading habits.
- Zarah, School Librarian in Action, writes in The Coffee Goddess, her personal blog, "i just realized, after attending the 1st philippine blogging summit, that i can put links in my blog if i use certain templates. (go ahead, smirk!)"
- And finally, Clair says in Blah!:
I would rather delve into the technical aspects of being a librarian. I love messing with those things. I love classification, indexing and abstracting. I love looking up potential materials for acquisition. I like not-so people-oriented tasks.
And then she asks, "Is there anything wrong with me? I feel so un-librarian-like right now." If there is anything wrong, it is that after confessing that she likes the activities librarians are supposed to like, she states that she feels "un-librarian-like." Well, if you look at her other blog, clair.free.net.ph, you'll see that she is probably the techie-est librarian blogging in the Philippines today. Very "un-librarian-like," indeed!
