One of my goals for this year is to start blogging again, and to start writing more regularly in general. I set a target in April to write two blog posts, and here it is, with only 10 days left in the month, and all I have are the beginnings of drafts of posts. I’ve been struggling to write because I feel like I can’t post something unless it’s Important and Meaningful and has Something To Say. I have a lot of thoughts swirling around in my head, about leadership and the importance of listening, and about strategic planning and assessment, and about higher education and how we broke it. Things a lot of other people are writing about, too. And that makes me feel like I don’t have anything to say that someone else hasn’t already said better, and that I don’t really know enough to say anything at all. So, my writing falters and the thoughts just keep swirling away up there.
The thing about writing, though, is that it’s the best way for me to process my thoughts. I tell students who are beginning a research project to just write, to write down all the things they know and think about their topic, and all the things they’re curious about and might want to know about their topic. I tell them that writing is central to learning, and that they shouldn’t worry about whether they’re saying something important or meaningful in the beginning, that they should just start writing.
Worrying about whether my blog is contributing anything valuable keeps me from contributing anything at all. For the last five and a half years I’ve been on the tenure track, expected to produce scholarship that contributes to the profession. Now I’m nearing the end, my final portfolio has gone through almost all of the levels of review, and tenure is pretty much guaranteed, unless I do something catastrophic and terrible between now and June. I’ve given presentations and written book chapters and articles and contributed papers to conference proceedings. I’ve done all the things a person is supposed to do get tenure, but do I think I’ve contributed to the profession? I don’t know.
I can say that I haven’t developed what I consider a research agenda. My role has changed multiple times in my years here, and my focus and interests have also changed. Like most people who contribute to library scholarship, I write and present on my day-to-day work, so I’ve given presentations about website content strategy and software migration and ILS configuration and I’ve written about open linked data and FRBR and open access publishing. I don’t necessarily feel that I’ve developed deep expertise or a research focus, and I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately. It’s ironic that it’s only now that I’m about to become tenured that I think I might have the time to really develop a research agenda and time to write in a more focused way.
I mentioned at the beginning of this rambling post that I’ve been thinking a lot about leadership, strategic planning, assessment, and higher education. I think there is a way that these things tie together, but I don’t know how yet. And I’ve been trying to figure out how they all connect before I start writing, even though I know that it’s the writing process that helps me figure out how they all connect. So, I’m going to start trying to figure it out here. I hope that it will be somewhat interesting for people to read, if there’s anyone anymore who even reads blogs. Do people still read blogs? Is that still a thing? Anyway, I think over the coming months and years (I hope, anyway) that a research focus will start to develop here, through writing and thinking and writing about what I’m thinking, and hopefully through engagement with other people who are also thinking. And writing. And I’m not going to wait until I have something Very Important to say. I’m just going to write.