Welcome to Ink and Vellum, a space set aside for discussions on libraries, information, and the sum of their parts. To begin, let me try to sum up what I hope to accomplish here. I want to explore the relationship between libraries and information. By “libraries”, I mostly mean those of Higher Education; by “information”, I mostly mean how we come to find it, how we interpret it, and how we attempt to organize it.
Even with those parameters established, I hope the content created here will be relevant to librarians and information professionals of all types of institutions. The stewards of the academic stacks often work shoulder-to-shoulder beside their colleagues in other spheres; the provinces they share are boundless. This is especially apparent in the virtual environments we occupy. So while my viewpoint may be from the perspective of academia, I hope the topics I explore with find common ground in the experiences of librarians in all walks of life.
I’ve been blogging since 2004 and previous experience has taught me that the content of a blog can move in unexpected directions; very often, this movement is opposed to the creator’s original intent. With that in mind, I’ve set up other social spaces for subject matter unrelated to what I explore here, namely a Tumblr blog for non-professional writing. For here, I’ve reserved issues relating to information seeking, source evaluation, personal and professional information management, and research. I also plan to touch on more general topics of academic librarianship and professionalism.
But if I had to settle for a single term around which to center my discussions, it would be Information Literacy. I make no claim to understand it. That knowledge gap, in fact, was the impetus for developing this space: to explore aspects of information literacy, what it means, and how understanding it can enrich our experience as providers of information services and, ultimately, the experiences of our users.
I hope, dear reader, that you will find the content here to be engaging, relevant, useful, inspiring, and/or timely, though I make no promises. There are many fascinating and compelling liblogs across the internets (see blogroll) and heaven knows we don’t need another one, but I humbly aspire to add something useful to the discussion.
Please let me know what you think along the way!