My library school buddy (and ALA roommate!) recently wrote about the difficulty of coming up with ideas for articles and presentation within the library field. She pretty much said exactly what I've been thinking about for the past few weeks. I want to publish something, but the way our field works, I'm not sure what the next "hot topic" will be, and I don't want to just re-hash something that's been written about a million times.
I like my current job, and, as Jon suggested, could possibly even change the name of my blog to the "Treading-Water Librarin," since I am managing to stay afloat. But I'm always thinking about the future, and I'm still getting list-serve emails about new positions opening up, so I'm starting to think about my next step, career-wise. Obviously, I have no plans to move on jsut yet, and this is all several years down the road, but eventually I want to be some kind of library big-whig (I'm thinking president of IFLA, that sounds fun. I'm all about living in the Hague!). So professional development is key for me.
I've been looking into some publications, and found some great resources, such as A Library Writer's Blog, but whenever I sit down to start outlining a paper, even if I've already done some research, I hit a brick wall. Since I don't have the background knowledge to keep up with Michael Stephens, I don't even want to try writing on new technology (at least not right now!). Most of my ideas tend to be in the library advocacy field, but, short of putting together an opinion piece about why libraries are super cool (not exactly the type of scholarly work I'm trying to do here), I'm not sure what to write about.
On the other hand, my paper for the Buffy the Vampire Slayer conference in June is coming along quite nicely!
Yeah. I'm a nerd.
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