Words of warning

This blog is going to change.

What seems now like a long time ago, I was an employed person, working full-time in a library, specifically in bibliographical services, and having opinions about such things which I occasionally thought worth sharing, although quite often I felt I had to bite my tongue. I created a blog to discuss professional issues and advertised it to those who I thought might be interested, and was gratified by your feedback. It provided a really useful space to air ideas and opinions and to learn from other people.

At the same time, I had a private life (albeit not much of one) and I created another blog, this one, which focussed on those things which happened to me as a private person and which allowed me to write about anything and everything which interested me. I kept it deliberately pretty anonymous and I didn’t advertise it much, if at all. Probably no one read it, and that was fine by me, because it was (and remains) the process of writing that satisfied me. 

Slowly, over the last eighteen months, things have changed. I retired from paid employment and although I still think about libraries and what happens in them, and what should happen, and why it sometimes doesn’t, I admit that what used to be a tight focus on bib services has gradually widened. Because of that, I stopped writing on my professional blog. After all, I could not assume that its readers would be interested in all the other stuff.

The distinction between professional and private life is always a precarious one. Years ago, what happened at work stayed at work and what happened at home stayed at home. The journey between work and home acted as a pretty safe seal, an airlock, between those two different worlds. Over the last five years, things have changed and especially the arrival of social media and mobile devices has meant that what were two distinct areas of life have bled together. And the distinction between my two blogs, which was always artificial to an extent, became difficult to maintain and difficult to justify. And now, with my change of lifestyle bringing the freedom of retirement and it no longer being the case that I feel it prudent to maintain a public face which might be cooler, more rigorous and more focussed than my private face, I am killing my other blog and this is going to be the only one.

I hope I shall meet here some folk who have travelled across, as well as some new readers. There may even be some library-related stuff starting to appear here, because I am still engaged with libraries, and this is going to be the place where anything and everything can be raised, whatever world it comes from. So, thanks for listening – and I shall keep writing, and hope that some of you will keep reading. 

Welcome to my new world.