• Brett Bonfield

    Drawing of Brett Bonfield by Derik Badman

    I am a 2007 graduate of Drexel University’s library school and the director of the Collingswood (NJ) Public Library. I have had leadership roles or served on committees in several professional organizations, and my writing has appeared in Library Journal, Reference and User Services Quarterly, ACRLog, PLA Blog, and a few other library and nonprofit technology publications. My resume is available online.
    That’s my bio. Now I’m going to tell you about me. But first I’m going to tell you why I’ve written a perhaps inexcusably long About Me page.
    1. I love learning about other people. I love book jacket blurbs, liner notes, literary memoirs. If others are willing to allow me into their lives, it seems only fair to allow others into mine.
    2. I would rather learn about others in their About Me pages than in their posts. As a rule, I unsubscribe from writers who spend too much time writing about themselves.
    3. I write mostly for people who are interested in making noteworthy contributions to librarianship. Which isn’t meant to imply that I’m an expert in this area or that I’ve made noteworthy contributions, but that’s my goal. My hope is the more you know about me, the more likely you’ll be to share this goal: If Brett thinks he has a reasonable chance of making a noteworthy contribution, I hope you’ll think to yourself, then I’m certainly capable of doing something noteworthy as well.
    I grew up in Abington, Pennsylvania, a suburb fifteen miles north of center city Philadelphia: on clear days you could walk to the Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot and see the William Penn statue that stands atop City Hall. I had classmates like Hollywood’s Deborah Kaplan and CN8’s Kevin Walsh, our class president; our most famous alumnus is Bob Saget. People who know me now imagine that I was like the male lead in Juno: tall, trim, polite, studious, and a little artsy: the sort of kid who you root for in the big race even though he knocked up your daughter. I wish it were true. Actually, I was a terrible student, habitually tardy, with awful hair and skin, sorry taste in clothes, arrogant, whiny, and often mean-spirited. John Hughes or Cameron Crowe probably could tell you what was going on with me, but I’m still mostly clueless. I tended to sleepwalk through my days and stay up all night reading books I’d found at the library. Not that it would have worked, but sometimes I fantasize about sitting the teenage me down at the kitchen table after dinner and reading a book while he does his homework, then praising him extravagantly simply for getting it done. Slowly, the conversation turns to him. We talk about the moment in his day he feels best about and the interactions that didn’t go so well. He tells me about the people he’s complimented and about who he has made to feel bad and what he wishes he had done differently.
    I have no idea why Rutgers accepted me, especially into a class that included Junot Diaz, who won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for his novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. When we were at Rutgers together, mutual friends showed him one of my short stories. His verdict: “Too visceral.” Which it was and, given that it wasn’t much else, he was being charitable. I also graduated with the then reigning College Jeopardy champion, Michael Thayer, our class co-valedictorian, who laughed at the in-jokes on the GRE and finished each section of the test in about a third of the time allotted, and still I didn’t hate him, perhaps because a couple of months earlier he’d been such a gentleman when he showed up at a party and found me doing my best to hit on his girlfriend. Of course, I had no idea she was his girlfriend, or anyone’s girlfriend, and of course I had no shot with her given that Michael Thayer was football-player sized and the reigning College Jeopardy champion and I, though a somewhat better student than I’d been in high school, was nowhere close to being the valedictorian, plus I still had bad hair and skin, horrible taste in clothing, and a tendency to be unpleasant, perhaps less frequently than when I was younger, but that’s not saying much. Suffice it to say that I was not then and am not now a Junot Diaz or a Michael Thayer, but I still managed to receive a college education that was somewhat similar to theirs, for which I consider myself extremely fortunate.
    My first real job after college was as a ghost writer in Development and Alumni Relations at the University of Pennsylvania. I was mostly responsible for thank you letters, though on occasion I’d do a proposal, a brochure, or a short speech. I wrote poorly and erratically, and in retrospect it’s clear that the other writers in my department, most of whom had children my age, could have saved themselves a lot of time and trouble by writing my assignments for me. Instead, they patiently edited my work, over and over, until what I'd written was acceptable. Most of the useful things I know about writing I learned from them. In addition to learning about writing, I taught myself web development, marking up pages in Pico on a 286 and checking them in NCSA Mosaic on a colleague’s Apple. In the early days, I mostly published my poetry, but within a few years I was ready to be the first webmaster for Penn's Alumni Relations website. The job was fine, but for some reason I thought of myself as a novelist, even though I’d never actually written a novel or even a really good short story. This didn't stop me from semi-retiring, and I spent three years finding out that I'll probably never make a living as a fiction writer. I managed to write a couple of novels, and finishing them felt great, but I can’t imagine subjecting anyone to either of them.
    I found a great job when it was time to resume full-time work, Director of Fundraising and Communications for NPower PA, the Philadelphia-based affiliate of a national nonprofit network whose mission is to provide computing support and training to other nonprofits. Even though it was a great job, I didn’t enjoy it nearly as much as I should have, which meant that it was time, finally, to take on a career I could truly love. I talked to a classmate from Rutgers named Chuck Dolan, one of the brightest and most wholly admirable people I’ve ever met. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa, spent a year writing songs, then went back to Rutgers for library school, where he met the woman who would become his wife, Dana Van Meter. He’s been the Technical Services Librarian at Middlesex County College in Edison, NJ since 1996; she’s been a serials librarian at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study almost as long. They like their jobs and each other, and they have a Princeton zip. When I called Chuck to tell him I was thinking about library school he said, in effect, ”So what took you so long?” Next I called my mother, who had recently retired from PALINET. I asked her to put me in touch with the smartest, most engaged librarian she knew. Within a couple of weeks Steven Bell had steered me toward Drexel and had encouraged me to try my hand at the specialization that most interested me, business reference at an academic library.
    In August 2006, I started working part-time at the University of Pennsylvania’s Lippincott Library of the Wharton School, and a month later I started taking classes at Drexel. I threw myself into my course work. For the first time in my life, I sat in the front row. I always did the reading, even the optional reading, and in class I always knew the answers. I learned how to use flash cards. I won my first ever academic award. I went to conferences. I had meetings. I wrote. Almost all of this shows up in my resume, so it’s not worth listing it here, and anyway it all comes down to two lessons that were, at least for me, fairly non-intuitive but incredibly important. The first is that people are looking for opportunities to say yes to you. My colleagues at Lippincott, Temple, and Saint Joseph’s gave me every opportunity to succeed, and I can’t say enough about the people I got to work with at all three libraries. My editors at Library Journal, Jay Datema and Norman Oder, were encouraging and patient and amazingly helpful. The librarians I answered to at ACRLog—Steven Bell, Barbara Fister, Marc Meola, and Kevin Clarke—are great role models, as is Andrea Mercado who let me write for PLA Blog. Tim Siftar at Drexel has a wonderfully expansive idea of what librarianship can and should be; he’s opened doors for me and for countless others. Luray Minkiewicz and the board of the SLA Philadelphia Chapter, and Greg Szczyrbak and the ACRL Delaware Valley Chapter board, are the most generous mentors an aspiring librarian could hope for. Washington University’s Stephanie Atkins and Cornell’s Angela Horne made me feel like I could do anything I set my mind to. And that doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of people who have done things for me, who have said yes to my ideas and given me an opportunity while asking nothing in return. Yet two people particularly stand out: North Carolina State University’s Susan Nutter let me do a report on the NCSU Library for a class I was taking, flew me to Raleigh, and lined up interviews with her entire management team as well as that year’s class of Fellows; she is the library director I want to be. And Gabriel Sean Farrell, my partner at LISinfo, is not only the person I want to be when I grow up, he’s the librarian I want our profession to be when it grows up. The second lesson is that what you did before you became a librarian counts, and not just a little bit. It matters that I wrote, that I was a fundraiser, that I was a technologist, that I was a manager at a small nonprofit for a year after I graduated college and before I got the job working at Penn. And it even matters that I want to make up for all the unkind things I said when I was younger, that I fantasize about helping teens, that I spent the wee hours of my childhood with my nose buried in anything that had words printed on it. It matters that we’ve spent the last eight years living in the town where my wife grew up, where she was president of her senior class, where she taught at the high school for three years, where we volunteer our time. It matters because it prepared me for my job at the Collingswood Public Library.
    There’s one other class of information I wish librarians would include in their About Me pages: a listing of the information sources we consult regularly. On occasion, you’ll see someone write about their favorite blogs, and most folks seem pretty good about maintaining their blogrolls. My goal is for this page to be a bit more than that: a complete list of every source I rely on for my own information needs. I get most of my information online, generally through feeds, which I subscribe to using rss2email and forward to my gmail account. There are no television programs listed because I don’t watch anything regularly and I never watch television news; I’m not opposed to television—I’ll flip it on when I’m tired, if I’m eating alone, or if there’s a game I want to see—but I don’t watch anything regularly enough for it to make the list. Yes, publishing this list feels indulgent and narcissistic. I’m doing it for one reason: I wish that everyone responsible for the following would do the same.

    Library: Individuals

    Library: Groups

    Library: Vendors, Projects, and Consortia

    General: News, Politics, and Business

    General: Public Relations and Fundraising

    General: Technology: Individuals

    Many of these writers rarely discuss programming, but all of them are programmers, and I believe the practice of thinking in code has had a positive influence on their writing.
    • Dean Allen's Textism is gorgeous and arrogant, a worthy successor for the man behind Textile, TextPattern, and TextDrive.
    • If Blueprint is just the tip of the iceberg, and I have a feeling it is, then Olav Bjørkøy is someone to watch.
    • Douglas Bowman's Stopdesign could be subtitled Stopwriting, because he almost never posts anything. But when he does it's worthwhile.
    • Read the wrong posts on Maciej Ceglowski's Idle Words and you'll wonder why he's on this list; read the right ones, and you'll wonder why he gives them away for free.
    • DeWitt Clinton's Unto is spare and brilliant without being combative or strongly ideological, a rarity on this list.
    • Mike Davidson's Mike Industries is clever and fun, sort of the Mystery Science Theater of the Internet. For instance, he was the first person I know of who customized MySpace pages; he also found a defensible use for Flash and may have developed the most reasonable response to email overload.
    • Stephen Fry. Yes, that Stephen Fry. I also recommend his novels.
    • Paul Graham's Essays are to internet startups what Warren Buffett's shareholder letters are to value investing. When he publishes a new one, I stop what I'm doing and read it immediately.
    • John Gruber's Daring Fireball was more fun when it was about more than just Apple, but it's still Gruber and he still offers more insight into the world than most any other writer.
    • One pretty good way to test whether an open source project, conference, or organization is useful and important is to see if Benjamin Mako Hill has written about his participation in it on Copyrighteous, his personal weblog.
    • Michael Kaply's Musings was interesting when his main subject was his work on the Firefox Operator extension. Now that he's taking a break from IBM, I expect it to get even better.
    • Andrea Mercado's LibraryTechtonics may have become a misnomer. The library profession's loss will be another profession's gain.
    • Mark Pilgrim's Dive Into Mark is my favorite blog ever, the first blog I point to when people criticize bloggers' writing. His Every exit ("It's time for me to find a new hobby.") was as devastating for me, in it's own way, as "Breaking the Wand" from the 1988 Bill James Baseball Abstract.
    • Aaron Swartz has a seemingly ungovernable intellect and charisma, a combination which seems to keep him a few steps ahead of everyone, including himself. If you aren't following his Raw Thought weblog then you're missing out on some fascinating reading.
    • Ryan Tomayko's post, "Administrative Debris," was enough to make me subscribe on the spot. After reading through his archive, I'm glad I did.
    • Guido van Rossum is Python's benevolent dictator for life. He doesn't write all that frequently, but it's worth paying attention when he does.
    • Steve Yegge's Blog Rants are like a late-night conversation with a friend after a few glasses of wine. Which can be annoying during your most productive hours, but a hell of a lot of fun when you're in a mellower mood.
    • There is a unique sort of pragmatic elegance to Simon Willison's ideas that shows up in his writing and his software.
    • The thing I like best about Jeremy Zawodny is that he wears his enthusiasm on his sleeve and isn't afraid of coming off as a fanboy.

    General: Technology: Groups

    • del.icio.us/popular is a great way to follow web trends, though I generally avoid any non-techie links.
    • YCombinator's Hacker News is my favorite online community in part because its founder, Paul Graham, is doing everything he can to keep it interesting to his target audience, startup founders and good hackers.

    Posts by Brett

     
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