This essay, “Silence in the Stacks” asks why there are so few academic librarian bloggers. I’m an academic librarian blogger but I doubt I’m the type of blogger McLemee is looking for, because I don’t tend to post about my job or the philosophical issues facing academic librarians much. There are many reasons for this:

I don’t blog under my real name, so I also don’t post very many day to day details of my job. This is a personal choice, although I’ve wondered from time to time about outing myself. I’m happy for now blogging with my online persona. So while I might have the urge to blog about the cool tutorial thing I’m working on or the fact that my library’s new acquisitions list now has RSS feeds, that might reveal too much about where I work.

Blogging won’t get me tenure. Not that I have to get tenure or even have the option of getting tenure, but if I’m going up for promotion and want to write more about librarianship, it would be more productive for me and more beneficial for my career as a librarian to actually write an article and try and get it published somewhere.

I don’t blog from work, so if I blog at all, it is during my free time. I like blogging more about the things that I use to distract myself from my job than my job itself. I tend to treat this blog as “down time” activity for myself as opposed to a forum where I bring up issues like the overselling of “information literacy” or the agony of high priced academic journal subscriptions. I’d much rather write about why I think Fullmetal Alchemist is cool than write about my day at work, which today involved a ton of data entry, a little bit of web page tweaking, many e-mails, the despair of project management when people on the team I am managing are incommunicative and forgetful, and my decision to procrastinate scheduling a bunch of ESL classes until tomorrow.

Fullmetal Alchemist is cool, by the way.