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.
Having taking a class with you I think back in 2009, I was impressed with your teaching style and the way you were able to able to integrate new things (web 2.0) into the the way traditional libraries work. I am sure there are a whole bunch of librarians (like myself) who took what we learned from you and made libraries a more inviting space that embraced and encouraged technology.
Wherecer your journey may take you, I wish you the best.
Thanks for the kind words, Dan! I still remember you fondly from that class. You brought such enthusiasm and open-mindedness to your everything you did. It’s been wonderful to get a small view into what you’ve done since via FB.
Congrats, Meredith! Yours was one of the first blogs I ever read, and I will always think of you and the other bloggers I knew back then as my real library school cohort.
Same! Reading blogs was way more formative to my development as a new librarian than anything I learned in library school. And the friendships and connections were also so much better.
Wow, 20 years! Congratulations on your journey! It was a pleasure seeing you come into the ranks of librarians and quickly make your mark, and continue making your mark. It was great having you as a fellow traveler through library technology issues, and I was happy to see your career take off. Thanks for sharing all the ups and downs through the years which I’m certain helped many, many people through some of the same issues they were facing too. Here’s to another 20! Or, at least until you can afford to retire in a well-deserved retirement.
Thanks Roy! It was the encouragement of folks like you and Andrew Pace that made me think I might actually have something worth writing. I’m so grateful for the years of conference dinners and amazing conversations with you and it’s wonderful (and aspirational) to see you enjoying retirement.
Happy blogaversary, Meredith – happy to hear you’re doing well 🙂
Thanks Paul — for this and all of your early encouragement and friendship!! I hope you and your family are doing well!!!
Happy blogaversary! 20 years is quite the accomplishment, and I have followed your blog for at least 10 of those years. I am looking over at my little notice board by my desk, and I have a little printout from your blog right there. It is your definition of slow librarianship, and I look at it every now and then to remind myself why I am here at all. In the midst of all the New Public Management malarky, it is easy to think that our value is reduced to something that will show up on a spreadsheet, and then I look to that little piece of paper that I cut from your blog, and I remember that the values of slow librarianship were what attracted me to this profession, and I will keep fighting for them. Thank you!
Thank you so much for the kind words! I’m so pleased to hear that slow librarianship resonated with you. It’s always good to critique New Public Management and other capitalistic trends in libraries, but I think having a positive vision for an alternative is much more powerful. I think our ability to imagine alternatives is our greatest asset.
Congratulations on your 20, and many more ahead.
Best, and keep on blogging.
Thanks Angel! I was just looking back at my posts from 2005 and saw some comments from you and remembered what a big part of my network you were back then. So it’s absolutely lovely to hear from you now. ❤️
Congratulations, Meredith! I got my MLIS in 2005 and have been following (and learning from) you since the beginning. I always appreciate your thoughtfulness. I found slow librarianship around the same time that you did and your posts the past several years have been really helpful to me as I consider my own place in the profession and my work/life balance. Appreciate you VERY much!
Thanks Sarah! That means a lot to me. I think a lot of us were coming to slow librarianship (or at least a reckoning with the way we had positioned work in our lives) around the same time and it’s been gratifying to see how many have embraced it in recent years.
Congratulations! Quite an accomplishment. Between you and me, I was hoping never to read the word “transliteracy” again.
BWAHAHAHAHAHA!!! You notice I didn’t mention anything about my time as the “Wiki Queen.” We *all* have those seasons of our lives we wish we could forget. And it’s fantastic to hear from you Tom! Thank you!
I’ve been writing a personal music blog for almost as long (though I wish it would have been on one consistent platform), and can really appreciate the longevity and dedication. Much appreciated!
Congratulations on 20 fruitful years – still haven’t reached 10, and nowhere near that much writing and reflection in that time.