Have been thinking a lot today about disciplinary boundaries...and about boundaries in general. The most intimately "life changing" technologies I've encountered (e-mail, laptops, wireless networking, digital video recorders, cell phones) have had as their defining quality the explicit breaking down of time/space boundaries.
Similarly, the theorists who have been most influential in my thinking are those that broke down boundaries between "disciplines." Bourdieu, Habermas, Foucault...all hard to place in one traditional box.
One of the things that drew me into librarianship was that it was an ∏ber-field--a big picture vantage point where one got to see information come together into a coherent whole. Need to revisit the whole issue of how I ended up here, in such a tech-focused environment. Too often drowning in the details of implementation, not enough time spent on the big picture vision. On the other hand, vision without implementation is hollow. Where's the balancing point?
Not enough thoughtful librarian blogs out there, I think. The Shifted Librarian is widely linked to. Fellow UMich alum Lou Rosenfeld has a good IA-focused blog. Jessamyn West's librarian.net looks interesting. Need to poke around more.
Trying to pare down the blogroll. There's no way I can survive grading week with as many blogs as I'm trying to follow right now. Dropped most of the "name" bloggers. My bottom line seems to be whether I can imagine myself actually enjoying a conversation with the writer, based on what they've posted publicly. If they feel too foreign in interests or tone, and the potential for interaction seems unlikely, I'm just saying no.
Was perusing kottke's archives, since it seemed unfair to make a keep or toss decision based on vacation postings, and found this most excellent illusion, which my kids will probably like as much as I do.
Must go home now. To bed, perchance to sleep. Back at 8am to watch freshman suffer through a lab practical. Ugh.
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