Guilt

I think I am reaching my personal threshold as a participant in online social networks. I've started to say no to Facebook apps and groups. I'm not even tempted to try Twitter (though that may change if I ever get an iPhone). But there's one realm I've neglected that I feel loads of guilt over. I've never given a serious chance to the social networks that help you keep track of what you've read and connect you to books (and readers) you are likely to love. Is it laziness? Lack of self-reflection? In a long-ago moment of weakness, I accepted a friend's invitation to join GoodReads. So now, almost daily, I get updates of what all my GoodReads friends are reading, have read, and plan to read. In the meantime, my own profile sits there nearly empty, with only the one book I entered almost a year ago. I'm very sure that the most recent friend request I got on GoodReads was from someone who thought that I, as a librarian, would have heaps of book titles and reviews for her to browse through. But no dice.

As an alternative, I've outsourced some of this work. A group of Computer Literacy 2 students are entering our graphic novel collection into LibraryThing for their semester project (when they come close to finishing, I'll kvell about them at greater length). I don't feel this exactly lets me off the hook, but it does relieve some of the pressure.