Me, Myself and the Wider Online World

After an enthusiastic start and the excitement of even recieving some comments, proving that there is someone out there listening, I've let things slip for a while. Life and a holiday in France got in the way, hardly a thing to complain about. So I'm attempting my second post on a french keyboard while trying to ignore my mosqito bites.

I have a lot of work to do yet to get my blog looking the way I want it too. There's a lot of housekeeping to be done with the layout and adding images which I plan to work on when I get home. Then I'll be giving guided tours to anyone interested! 

In the mean time I’ve done plenty of thinking about what kind of online presence I want to have and how much of it will be personal and how much will be professional. I googled myself and found plenty of me out there but they're not me, so to speak but other Niamh O’Donovans. Until now my personal online presence has consisted of me lingering in the background, observing, 'liking' the odd thing and venturing an occasional comment. Starting this blog is a big step for me in putting myself out there for scrutiny.

When I came up with the name The Conscious Library I was just playing around with a few words in the theasaurus and thought 'yeah that sounds good'. It fits the formula for picking a good blog name, easy to remember, short, specific but sort of generic at the same time. It refers to libraries but it could be about a lot of things. I did have to look up the correct spelling of conscious but I’m a renowned bad speller. What I particularly like about the name is that it can transfer easily to other sites like twitter for example, so there’s plenty of potential for development. Like a lot of things I do, I came up with the finished product first and worked out the concept afterwards. 

In my head I imagine the Conscious Library to be like online version of a real library - which I think a lot of blogs are already. There are a lot of bloggers out there who are already librarians though not by profession. They might not thank me for referring to them as librarians but they do essentially the same thing we do every day in our physical libraries- recommend reading, provide information and create an open comunity space for people to connect with eachother. Two that come to mind are Flavorwire and Brainpickings and I recommend you check them out.

I would like The Conscious Library to become a space for swapping ideas, thoughts and opinions as well as showing off the things we do in our library that I’m proud of.  I hope this blog will advance what I do in my everyday job as a librarian, into the online world.

So there is part of my brand, the rest will come together as I go along I hope. I’m still lurking in the background to a degree, a bit reluctant to put myself out there completely.While I am the curator and developer of The Conscious Library, I see it as a seperate entity to me. I guess that might change over time as bits of my personality sneak in. Lets see if it turns out how I expect.

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