I have been a little bemused by the many posts and comments on library-related blogs in the past week that mention NASIG. Great exposure, right? Right, except that most of them seem to have focused on one person’s informal writeup of one particular session that discussed the role of columnists in library journals in a world increasingly dominated by blogs. Anna Creech (Eclectic Librarian) provides a bit more perspective of what was said, which is good, especially since she was there. I mention bemusement because frankly a lot of what has been written seems to me to be a little too quick to judge and especially, a little too quick to assume an “us (bloggers, the good people) vs. them (those evil, skulking column people who are fearful of bloggers)” perspective. Behold, the power — and peril — of blogs.

Let me make it clear, first of all, that I wasn’t there for the presentation. I wish I had been. What I write here is simply the result of reading various posts about “the incident.” For those who don’t know to what I refer, “the incident” involved a presentation at this year’s NASIG conference that apparently had some negative (and perhaps unfair) comparisons to make between columns in print library literature and information derived from blogs.

Second, my general point here is, calm down folks and try to get some perspective! T. Scott Plutchak writes about this in his blog and combines this perspective with discussion of another controversial blog post by Michael Gorman. T. Scott’s tone is welcome. He also makes the following point:

“We are really still at the very beginnings of figuring out the best ways to engage in discourse using all of these new tools.”

I think this is true, but one could imply from that statement that what we are experiencing in the blogging world is radically different than what we have long experienced in other forms of discourse. (Also, T. Scott seems to question — and I think rightly so — the prevalence of written responses to Gorman’s post that attack him personally. This isn’t new; a few years ago the same thing happened in response to another Gorman statement, and it also happened in a discussion about Indiana’s library school dean.) I don’t think that the struggle to figure out “the best ways to engage in discourse” is something new to blogging. One only has to attend a few scholarly conferences to put the blogging discourse into perspective. It is not uncommon to see faculty presenting papers with opposing viewpoints devolve into very thinly veiled personal attacks as the papers are discussed. I saw a few such scholarly conference exchanges firsthand when at The University of Chicago. It was entertaining at times, but also disconcerting.

One thing that is a little different, though, is the speed and the ease with which such discourse can be articulated, disseminated, interpreted, and reacted to in the world of blogs. And then reworded, or re-articulated, or re-interpreted, or re-reacted to (bad English, I know), again and again until the discourse peters out.

Here is a list of the various blog postings I’ve read about “the incident” just for the record. And be sure to also look at comments for all of them:

Eat-Your-Vegetables librarianship alive and well (metaProjects)

Out of Context or Being a Hypocrite (A Wandering Eyre)

Authority, Formality, Reality, Hypocrisy (Walt at Random)

since when did this become a column? (Eclectic Librarian)

Still in the incunabula stage (T. Scott)

If I’ve missed any others, please add a comment to this post letting me know.