[Dear Tech-Inkers: below is a manifesto I have written to define what this blog is for. Please feel free to edit or add to it to reflect the direction you feel it should go, or to ensure that it's properly conveying your circumstances or interests. It will be a far more interesting place if I'm not the only one to define it: don't be shy! Edit away!]

Internet technology and new media move fast; libraries generally move slowly. As librarians, it’s easy for us to get comfortable and do what’s required of us and nothing more, particularly in a world where library patron satisfaction is based on how friendly we are and not on how accurate, or innovative, or trend-setting we are. It’s easy not to be innovative; innovation scares people. Change makes people uncomfortable. Introducing new ideas translates into more work, more thinking, more feeling insecure at not being on top of all this change, or not being in the loop. It’s easier, more comfortable, and more popular to just do what’s expected. To just keep digging one particular ditch without looking up.

This blog is about looking up. We don’t want to dig the same ditch for the rest of our lives. We are curious and thoughtful people interested in the way communication is changing. We like the way the world is turning authority on its ear and opening up publishing platforms to anyone and everyone. We like what this means in terms of our old ways of talking about legitimacy and information literacy. We like the new genres and forms of communication that are being generated all around us. We like the challenges that are being made to old ideas like copyright, distribution, sharing, and authorship. We are intrigued that currently available information is taking on new meaning, new power and new potential as it gets mashed together via new media with geographic data, contributed text, and images. We are keen to be part of the conversation around these things. We have much to offer and learn.

We want to discuss how new media impacts us, our patrons, and the information around us; we want to move toward new media with wide open eyes and helping hands. We want to be actors and partipicants, movers and shakers, not just witnesses. We need to come out from behind the desk. The internet needs us as much as we need it. It needs us to evaluate it, find ways to apply it, make it valuable, give it a niche if it deserves one. We need new media to help us to change the way we think about old problems and methods; it is one of our catalysts toward innovation.

The purpose of this blog is to create a venue for this kind of discussion. Not all librarians share our interest in the impact of new media and the internet on our profession, our patrons, and ourselves; this is a place where we can share our discoveries, our enthusiasm, our questions and musings, or our disappointments with like-minded souls. It is a place to record what we learn and build on each other’s experiences. It is a place where we can challenge each other and ourselves.

While in-depth considerations of serious and academic new applications is welcome and likely, so is random, joyous play with applications that appear to have no intention of improving the minds of anyone. (Most of the best applications we have we never meant to be anything but fun.) Play is a crucial part of learning, and if we jettison things to fast because they aren’t “serious” enough, we risk avoiding any innovation or valuable learning altogether. Fun things have more potential for social change than boring things. Fun things tap into parts of ourselves that we tend not to invoke when we put on our serious learning faces; those things might be the key to our ability to learn deeply.

This blog is the place where we will spill virtual ink about being virtual; the hardware that gets us there, the software that guides us, the communities that people create and develop, the information they generate, and the ways these things change (or have the potential to change) our library environments.

We hope you’ll join us!

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