Thing 2 : meeting the neighbours

Thing 2 in the CPD23 things programme is "investigate other blogs", find some of interest, follow, comment and generally get used to how the whole thing works and find out who else is taking part. There are so many! I'm sure I've missed many that are relevant to me and hope to stumble across them via tags - or serendipity - which come to think of it is probably how our catalogue works too.

I've found four colleagues from my own workplace so far, including a cataloguing colleague's blog darksideofthecatalogue, and Notes from the basement (featuring our special collections where I spend some of my time with the rare books), and lots of people who are already Twitter contacts, but I'm also hoping to reach out a bit and find the ones I don't already know in real life or online.

As my career, if that's what it is, has been quite diverse, I have a fairly wide range of points of interest (cataloguing, subject librarianship, public libraries, special collections, rare books, Welsh). I've found some blog names I like, e.g. ones with literary or cultural references such as Palely loitering and Libraries gave us power. I'm looking forward to following Adventures of a Welsh Librarian, from the National Library of Wales (one of the many places I've been associated with!) : it's a partly bilingual blog, too, which I also considered doing although I think for the purposes of CPD23 I will stick to English as there don't seem to be many Welsh-speaking participants. This may change later on once I have a better feel for how I might use the blog in future. Name and appearance make a big difference, sort of "kerb appeal" for blogs : I need to work out how everyone else is doing all the clever things which make their blogs look so professional, and I still need to come up with a better name for my own.   And finally, a trivial fact : a lot of people called Helen work in libraries!