Sunday, December 07, 2008

Anonymous again

It will come as no surprise to most of you that I have decided to stop updating this blog, since I haven't updated the damn thing in a month, anyway. When I began using Twitter to post my more entertaining refdesk moments I thought it would free the blog for incisive commentary. Obviously I have none to offer.

However, I am going one step further. I will no longer post to Twitter under my current name. Oh, I'll probably invent a new name and keep tweeting (It's fun!) but I'll only let a few people know.

I want to be anonymous again. Ref Grunt was an anonymous blog until the book was published (though word had got out sooner than I thought: I subsequently learned that one admin had already been talking about my blog in seminars, which I find discourteous to me. Surely I should be the one who outs my blog). When the book came out I was worried about the reaction here, but the only thing my library did was buy a copy. I'm grateful that no one here has ever told me to stop, or tell me what I could or could not say on Ref Grunt. No one's even grumbled. The only reaction were coworkers telling me how funny they think it is. I know well that in other places I could have easily been warned or even dooced by now.

But they ARE reading it. More and more it's making me uncomfortable.

The original Ref Grunt was a way for me to laugh and comment on my refdesk absurdities, and to my surprise it struck a chord with other librarians. Maybe because I was just another reference librarian, somewhere, doing the same chores, scratching my head over the same odd questions they got.

I'm beginning to think I can't do that anymore if my library knows it's me. So it's toodle-oo to Ref Grunt and "Peterburd." I'll be tweeting again soon. Hope you figure out it's me.