On 20 Years of Blogging at Information Wants to be Free

Today is the 20th anniversary of this blog. I put that on my calendar about 6 months ago when I realized how close to 20 years I was and then promptly forgot about it until last night when I realized it was already mid-November. 20 years feels like something to celebrate, especially when I think about how few people I blogged with in 2004 are still posting (according to this post, blogging was already on the wane in 2009, and that was nothing compared to where we are now). I don’t write nearly as much as I did when I started (holy crap, 302 posts in a year, Meredith? Get a life!), and there have been many times when I’ve wondered if I should just stop blogging altogether, but every once in a while I’ll get really revved up about a topic and will be grateful that I still have this space. Other than when I was on the tenure track, I’ve never felt the need to publish in fancy peer-reviewed publications (though I have written for some); this space suits me fine. 

When I started this blog, I had been married for three months and was about a month away from graduating from library school. I was really passionate about the profession and was driving my husband nuts talking about library stuff all the time, so a blog seemed like a good space to share my ideas, keep current, and do what I love, which is writing. And I’m so grateful to have had this space to work out my often jumbled thoughts ever since. Since then, I got what really was a dream job after a long and soul-killing job hunt. Then, in the span of what felt like both the longest and shortest five years ever, I got a book deal and wrote Social Software in Libraries (2006-7), got an American Libraries column (2007), started teaching for San Jose State (2008), started traveling around the world giving talks (2007-2012), and had a baby (2009). I look back on those years and it feels both like a whirlwind and like I was living a particularly charmed life. Yes, I worked my ass off and basically made librarianship my life in an incredibly unsustainable way, but a lot of people do that and don’t have all the things fall in their laps that did for me. I think a lot of it was being at the right place at the right time (when old media, library associations, and library schools were trying to become more “web 2.0”) and being loudly and unapologetically myself. It was quite the ride and I recognize the good fortune I had to experience it. 

I feel like my next 14 years were years of slow dismantling. I became antsy to climb the career ladder at a job I loved and left for a job at a toxic workplace that made me question my worth as a librarian and as a human being. I was fortunate to find my current job at PCC, which I’ve been at for over a decade now, which was (and still is in many ways) a dream. And, in an environment in which I both had tenure and felt safe, I was able to start separating out what I did because I loved it and what I did because I thought it was necessary to climb a ladder or to feel worthy. In those years, I struggled with work/life balance (especially as a mother and while negotiating the tenure track in my previous job) and experienced a mid-career crisis/burnout. I’ve still published, presented, served on committees, and taught, but far, far less than I used to, and only when it was about things I was passionate about (like building a culture of assessment, accessible online education, privacy, DEI, slow librarianship, embedding library instruction, etc.). I even gave up writing for American Libraries because I felt like I’d had enough (too much?) of the spotlight and wanted to see the publication give other folks a chance. During the pandemic, I finally recognized after 20 years of suffering with debilitating migraines that I had a real disability, advocated for accommodations, and then was promptly further disabled by COVID and an autoimmune disease. Fortunately, all that came at a time when I’d de-centered work and de-coupled it from my sense of worth and was able to properly prioritize my health.

Today, I’m going through old posts and reflecting on what I’m most proud of in my work here. With over 900 posts, I obviously didn’t look at everything. I focused on posts I remember loving and those that got a lot of comments (would you believe my blog used to regularly get 20-75 comments on a single post???). Believe me, there were plenty of posts that made me cringe (oversharing, being a self-righteous jerk, being suffused with vocational awe, etc.), plenty that made me want to give my former self a hug or tell her “you don’t need to keep proving yourself!”, but I still see a lot to feel proud of, even from my early years in the field.  

I’m proud of the critical and questioning stance I’ve had since the beginning. I feel like while people were jumping on bandwagons around things like Library 2.0, adopting free Web 2.0 technologies for critical library services, and rebranding information literacy as transliteracy, I was critically evaluating those things, even when doing so didn’t make me a popular person. I’m also proud of standing up against oppressive practices in libraries, like devaluing library workers who don’t have an MLIS,  hiring for “fit” (which was still a very common practice when I wrote this), neutrality, and open offices among others.

I’m proud of my consistent advocacy for online learners. I had an absolutely crappy experience doing my MLIS degree online and have always wanted to right those wrongs for other students, with my early work as a distance learning librarian, my online teaching at San Jose State, and my advocacy for equal treatment of online students. Unfortunately, it feels like after 20 years, while there is more of a focus on quality in online teaching, library services for online students are still largely treated like an afterthought and it breaks my heart. 

I’m proud of my writing about teaching, which has been the heart of my work for nearly 20 years. Here are just a few that I can still look and not feel embarrassed about:

• “I need three peer reviewed articles” or the freshman research paper (2011)
• The devil you know in first-year instruction (2012)
• Library DIY: Unmediated point-of-need support (2013)
• Peer learning in library instruction (2015)
• The ballad of the sad instruction librarian (2017)

I’m proud of my writing about slow librarianship, starting with this 2019 series (which was before I even called what I was writing about slow librarianship):

• Thoughts at Mid-Career Part 1 – Letting Go, Questioning, and Pathfinding
• Thoughts at Mid-Career Part 2 – Ambition: You are Not Enough
• Thoughts at Mid-Career Part 3 – Our Achievement Culture: What You’re Doing Will Never Be Enough
• Thoughts at Mid-Career Part 4 – The Cult of Productivity: You’re Never Doing Enough
• Thoughts at Mid-Career Part 5: Where to From Here?

Here are the other posts I’m particularly proud of that are about (or are closely related to) slow librarianship. If you’re interested in learning more about slow librarianship, these are good posts to look at:

• Slow life, slow librarianship (2021)
• What is slow librarianship? (2021)
• Stop normalizing overwork (2022)
• Valuing maintenance (2022)
• Vocational awe is always harmful (2023)
• With work time at the center (2024)
• The productivity trap (2024)
• Queer Time, Crip Time, and Subverting Temporal Norms (2024)
• Community Time and Enoughness: The heart of slow librarianship (2024)

I don’t know how much longer I’ll be writing this blog. I certainly didn’t expect to be writing this 20 years in and I’ll be retired in another 20 years and will be happy to fully disengage from librarianship when I do. I guess I can promise that as long as I have something to say, something I feel passionately about, I’ll probably write about it here. And I vow never to write things just to fill the space or because I’m scared of losing readers; everything I write will be suffused with the same care I have put into my recent posts.

This blogaversary also coincides with the deactivation of my X/Twitter account, which I plan to do this week. I’ve been on there since April 2007 and it’s also a huge chronicle of my adult life. I downloaded an archive of my feed and I read things about my son’s early years that I had totally forgotten about.  I’ve always had mixed feelings about Twitter, but I stayed for far longer than I thought I ever would. You can find me on Bluesky now as librarianmer. And if you’re a newsletter fan, know that you can also subscribe to get this blog in your Inbox.

I grew up in a house where there wasn’t a lot of joy or positive recognition, so in response, I’ve always been a big over-celebrator of everything. I will look for any excuse to celebrate someone or something and to show my gratitude. And frankly, isn’t that how it should be? As I’ve said before, gratitude is an endlessly renewable resource. So I’ll be eating cake with my family to celebrate the only thing I’ve stuck with for 20 years other than my marriage. And I hope you can find things in your own life to celebrate. Your exercise streak. A project you just finished. Your tenure at a job or on a committee. Something you built or made as a hobby. Finishing that really hard video game. Making it through the week. Seriously. Everyone deserves a celebration! And if you can’t think of anything to celebrate, just know that I’m grateful for you, reader. You who take the time to read my words, even sometimes when my posts are way too long. Even when you don’t make yourself known to me through comments or by sharing on social media, I’m grateful that you’re here.