I enjoyed watching everyone flex their bloggy muscles during June, but maybe we need another exercise to keep up the impetus. I’m being selfish here – I want to read more Australian library blog posts… And maybe some people who did not join in in June could test the waters?

Bobbi Newman from the Librarian by Day blog has been behind the “Day in the Life of A Librarian” project for the last couple of years. Every six months an ever-growing group of librarians is recording what happens during the same week. Here are the instructions from her blog post, Round 5 of Library Day in the Life!.

The only suggestion I would make is that as well as joining the wiki, we could tag all our posts “ozlibdayinthelife5” . UPDATE 26 JULY 2010. The generic tag is “libday5” , so let’s go for “ozlibday5” instead.

So, who’s in?

July 26th 2010 will start Round 5 of Library Day in the Life Project.

What is the Library Day in the Life Project? well it started with this post suggesting that we blog what we do all day at work.  Libraries are changing so rapidly and we all know no ones is reading books, despite what the public may think  The idea being that you’re sharing an average day, so many of us don’t have an average day though so a lot of people did a week, me included. I maybe just do a day this time though, we’ll see.

If you are wondering why you should participate Meredith Farkas offers an excellent explanation of why she did. The Project has turned into a great resource for students, instructors, staff and patrons.

So how you particpate?

• Go to the wiki
• Create a PB Wiki (pbworks?) account (it’s free)!
• Add your name, your job title (so we can see what you do at a glance) and a link to your blog.
• On the 27th start recording your day or week.  It doesn’t have to be a blog post it can be photos, podcasts or videos
• Tag your posts, pictures, videos, podcasts with librarydayinthelife.
• After you’ve finished your first day come go back to the wiki and edit your link to link directly to your tagged blog posts, videos or photos.

Of course read along!

To all the 30 posts in 30 days bloggers – whether you have done every day or not, whether you have read every post or not, whether you have commented on many posts – thanks so much for your energy and sharing.

To all the Libraries Interact bloggers who have faithfully managed to summarise each day – thanks for pointing out those posts that I should not miss and letting me feel connected even when I couldn’t manage to get to my feed reader.

I’m expressing my utter admiration because it being after midnight and my turn to summarise Sunday 27 June, I’m sitting here with 24 tabs open in my browser with every post made on Sunday . I have no hope of summarising them before I fall asleep…

Bang! Uploaded to Flickr byToastyKen

I guess then, rather than admit defeat, I’ll ask a question… Now that we have the energy and connection from June…what now? Anyone have any ideas about a final theme for the last day of June? Some way we can mark the passing of an amazing group effort ( Let’s allow one day off per week, that’s 26 posts x 30 bloggers which makes …. 780 more posts in the Australian biblioblogosphere) … so…

How do we go out with a bang?

Sunday can be a day of rest and maybe a time to think about pacing oneself. This is reflected in posts by Sue, Fiona, and even Michelle talking about how it can be difficult to keep up the same profile on Twitter when her job duties have changed. Kate enjoyed a long weekend of no housework (a splendid idea!) and shared a coffee and some tulips with us.

Not everyone was pacing themselves. Kate was sharing a very admirable contract with herself about what she would like to achieve in the next week. Snail managed to pack in four more movies in the Sydney Film Festival, making it ten over three days. Mal wandered the 17th Biennale of Sydney and wished for a parking fairy to make things easier.

People were meeting and greeting. Hoi had a secret library meeting while Jenelle shared a little bit of Australia with some New Yorkers, in the form of some traditional sausage rolls.

Some of us had our brains in gear on the weekend. NewGradLibrarian loved being a librarian yesterday when she showed her Miss 16 the Google Wonder Wheel to help her with her research. Ghylene shared the fruits of her clever brain – a prize-winning piece of speculative fiction. Seasoncreep continues to share a daily haiku.

In a delightfully serendipitous creative exchange, Sally shared Kim’s crochet lessons, while Kim shared Sally’s recipe for meringues.

One of our 30 posts in 30 days blogs, the National Library of Australia’s New Technologies Interest Group’s blog has a neat little post about ebooks today A book by any other name .

In the post, it mentioned being able to download ebooks from public libraries. It made me wonder how many Australian public libraries are offering this so far? Not *audiobooks*, but ebooks. And is everyone using Overdrive or is anyone using something else?

I already knew about

• Gold Coast Libraries
• Brisbane/Yarra Plenty libraries joint effort
• ACT public library

A quick sweep of my Twitter network revealed:

• Ashfield, Burwood, Canada Bay, Marrickville, Strathfield
• Melbourne Library Service ( I could only find a link to the downloadable audio books)
• Randwick
• Sutherland (I could only find a link to the downloadable audio books)
• Penrith (I could only find a link to the downloadable audio books)

Additions after original post:

• Logan Library
• Ipswich Library and Information Service

Come to think of it, are any school libraries offering this service to their school communities? If not, what are the barriers? Would love to hear about this – and any other public libraries…surely there must be more?

The weekend arrives and with it posts that are more relaxed and more personal.

We have watched our families play sport – at least Penny and Kate did. We have thought about the effects of the colder weather on citrus (Sue), chihuahuas (Con)  and on the number of people who use our libraries (Michelle)…although the stifling humidity in New York has been keeping Jenelle awake.

The weekend has brought out the creativity in our bloggers too – stitching and bitching, letter writing, flash fiction and  beautiful prezi presentations. We’ve been out and about -  barcamping , falling off our bicycles (ouch!), going to movie festivals, roadtripping to South Gippsland and Bathurst and even planning library based tourism at a brother’s wedding in Hong Kong …

So far most of us have kept up with a post a day, blogging more in the last week than many of us have in months. I wonder whether it will become a nice  exercise in “letting go of perfect”?  I have seen a couple of people tweeting “just have to get this post done before I can sleep”. I wonder whether by the end of this we will be comfortably just putting down *anything* that comes to mind – and whether this will actually make our blogging better ?  I know that the posts that readers often respond to or retweet tend to be those that I just dash off as an incidental thought, while the ones I carefully craft like icing sugar flowers are passed by without a comment. Staying tuned and looking forward to finding out.

Thanks to Sally at Sally Sets Forth , here is a list of blogs taking part in the 30 posts in 30 days challenge:

• There she goes
• Ruminations
• Haikugirloz
• Justgirlwithshoes
• virtually a librarian
• Librarians Matter
• Strawberries of Integrity
• Batgirl’s Book Blog
• FromMelbin
• Walking Upside Down
• snail
• Feral Librarian Tales
• moonflowerdragon
• Suelibrarian
• ADHD Librarian
• CreativeCirc
• SkinniBitch
• Bonito Club
• LiberryDwarf
• Opinions from an OPL
• Rien d’important
• a Public Librarian
• Connecting Librarian
• Season Creep
• UPDATE: 4:16pm West Australian time … *four more makes 28* … come on , just two more for 30 x 30 x 30
• Jenelle.net
• Miss Sophie Mac
• Creative Circ
• sardonicsmile
• Librarian with different hats
• UPDATE 4:28pm west Australian time: Of course – Sally’s own blog is number 29!
• Sally Sets Forth

With 24 blogs, multiplied by 30 posts, that would make 720 new posts in the next month. Even if we do half of that, then 300 new posts would be quite a feat.

Later today I will create an OPML file of feeds from these blogs so that you can pop them all into your feed reader in one easy chunk …. later …. unless someone else wants to jump in first ….

FINAL UPDATE 5:08pm Western Australian time: Kate Bunker has made a great Netvibes page of feeds from the 30 in 30 challenge, which is the best way to keep track I think.

EVEN MORE FINAL UPDATE: 6:58 Western Australian time: Welcome to Edgar and the team at the NLA New Technologies Interest Group, Blog number 30 for 30 in 30.

Expect an explosion of (great?) content on Australasian library blogs this month.

Over on Twitter, Con Wiebrands, librariesinteract Thali member and blogger at Ruminations, has thrown down the gauntlet.  Following the example of Stephanie at There She Goes she asked the question:

“am going to try to blog everyday for the month of June. any bloggers care to take up the challenge?”

Four or five Australian library bloggers have committed to do this already. So far Con is Blogging Thankfully and Kate at Virtually a Librarian seems to have put the future of her blog on the line – hoping this will either revitalize it or her blog will be “no more”.   We expect to see film reviews from snail.

Want to join in?

There is no need to register or anything, but how about people who are challenging themselves to do this pop their name, blog name and post where they announce that they are doing it in the comments here so we can keep track and share.

On Twitter we decided there are no rules to this. One blogger will only be doing weekdays. On my blog, Librarians Matter, I want to aim not to have any posts that are primarily link posts of the “I saw this interesting post today, here it is” variety … I’m aiming for “think posts” where I at least give a thought or opinion. If you are setting your own rules or variations, that would be nice to know in the comments here too.

I am setting myself another challenge – at least 30 comments in 30 days, and hopefully more. Even if you don’t blog, how about you get involved by trying this challenge and jumping into conversations on some of the blogs below? There should be plenty to choose from.

UPDATE: We are using the hashtag on Twitter #blogeverydayofjune .

Finally we have a Twitter account. – @libsinteract

We will be sending out a link to all new blog posts.

We will also sometimes push out tidbitty news that doesn’t need its own blog post.

And you can use it talk to the Thali via DM (direct message) – tell us a good story, flatter us, offer us awards, alert us to a factual error or bad grammar … whatever your 140 characters allow.

It’s still experimental, and this post is really a test to see whether the feed updates OK

Libraries Interact and friends will be covering VALA 2010 live.

Feel free to come along to the planning meeting, or to offer ideas via the google group: http://groups.google.com/group/unconfwalib .