Liblogarians, Nairarbils & nIrVANa

I asked my new friends* if they knew of any Blogs by Asian librarians, or librarians from Asia, for that matter.
[* A great bunch of people - hailing from Hong Kong, mainland China, Taiwan, Fiji - librarians whom I met during the HKUL Leadership Institute 2004]

Not unexpectedly, there do not seem to be many. There are quite a few librarians and library professionals in the Blogosphere. Just doesn't seem to be many (or any) from Asia.

A few days later, out of the blue (or whatever colour the Internet might be), I received an email with the subject header "liblogarian". The email address was legitimate and so was the name, just that I didn't know who that person was. To add to the mystery, the email merely contained a link to a blog.

Since the terrorists have not yet invented email-explosives (now that's a scary thought!), I clicked without hesitation (ok, maybe a tiny tiny wee bit) and was brought to a blog, whose stated goal was to expire after one thousand, [nine hundred] and ninety-seven posts.

BINGO! I've met my first Asian Liblogarian!

I'd wished I'd thought of this very cool term, "Liblogarian" - a combination of "Librarian" and "Blogger". But I didn't. Kudos to Gah Gah.

Clearly, Gah Gah has a penchant for cool (or in IRC-speak, "kewl") names and catchy terminologies. Well, Gah Gah, you're "Nairarbil**" no longer (someone include the word in the dictionary please!)
[**Quote: Nairarbil - a backward librarian, librarian spelt backward]

BTW, a fellow librarian from Wuhan University Library very kindly shared that a Blog was 'Bo ke' or 'Wang Luo Ri Ji' in Mandarin. The former (sounds like "Broker") was a direct phonetic translation of the English 'Blog'. The latter was a four-character combination to mean "Internet Diary", i.e. "Wang Luo" = Internet; "Ri Ji" = Diary.

I think there will be more Asian Liblogarians. Dr. Anthony Ferguson (of Hong Kong University Libraries) emailed me that he'd recently looked into Blogs and referred the idea to their collection development librarians, who do a lot of liaison work with the faculty. He thought that a Science Library Materials blog might be a good idea.

I think so too.

It's my hope that librarians and library professionals in Asia would have an active and productive presence on the Internet or Blogosphere. An Asian Liblogarians Blogosphere that is inclusive in all sense of the word... (there's the language barrier to overcome, but well, that's fodder for another Blog post).

When that day comes, I'd really be in nIrVANa***.
[*** A nickname from Gah Gah, which is a play on my name, "Ivan". Is Gah Gah a wordsmith or what? :) ]

So readers & fellow bloggers, if you know of weblogs written by Liblogarians in Asia, I'd appreciate if you could drop me an email. I'll include it in the list of Liblograrians in Asia (see my list of links on the right).