There's a curious article in the latest THES:
Brabazon, Tara
Boomers in thrall to a wiki universe
THES, 16 November 2007, 1820:14
It doesn't yet appear in the electronic version, either in the free area or the subscribers section.
Brabazon who, it seems, is Professor of Media in that institution that lies the other side of a railway line and a main road to mine, is complimentary about librarians, but dismissive of bloggers: writing about recent library conferences, and I wish she would say which she means, she concludes that we promote 'right-wing populism' and replicate 'colonial structures of the 19th century'.
I think she is wrong to set librarians against bloggers. I belong to both groups, and I think I and others are trying, as the best librarians always have, to use new technologies to make our services to scholars better.
She thinks that we have lost 'the capacity to value the particular, the unique, the ephemeral and the transitory. I could cite several blogs whose sole function is to present particularity, uniqueness, ephemera and transitoriness. I hope some of my posts may have those qualities too.
Professor Brabazon rightly inveighs against male consultants who leech off a predominantly female profession. May I proudly point out that I am a male librarian, but I am emphatically not a consultant? Indeed my only attempt to be one, during an unfortunate period of unemployment, ended horribly.

