j's scratchpad

"Thoughts on journalism, librarianship and blogging from a news librarian at the Harvard Office of News and Public Affairs."

I haven’t been happy with the description of this weblog Google created for some time because it makes it seem like this weblog is somehow part of my job or officially affiliated with my employer when it is absolutely not.

When I investigated how to change it, I was disappointed to read that Google won’t manually update the listing.

I’m not sure whether I should try to correspond with them about it or not. On the one hand, Harvard University is very particular about the use of its name, especially with regard to affiliations. On the other, I am a news librarian who works for Harvard, so the statement isn’t incorrect. It’s just not something I want stuck to this weblog, especially since I try hard to make it clear that blogging in this space is a hobby and not something I do as part of my job. This weblog also has no official affiliations with the university other than using its blog server.

Why can’t other search engines let people claim their listings like Feedster does?

Addenda 7/13: Greg’s right: the Open Directory Project has the same description in their list.

I like their rules about good titles: “Should have the first letter of each word in the title capitalized, except for articles, prepositions or conjunctions unless they begin the site title.”

7/17: Eeeks. Another one.

7/20: Wow. I think I’m being mocked. DMOZ now says “Thoughts on journalism, librarianship and blogging from a news librarian at a prestigious American university,” which, to me anyway, uses my place of employment even more as a marketing tool for this weblog–something my employer really frowns upon, which is why I asked them to remove any reference to my employer in the first place. Don’t people at DMOZ realize bloggers get fired for not maintaining good relationships with their employers on their weblogs? I try hard to make sure that my readers understand that this blog is not part of my job. It’s purely a hobby. I don’t use my employer as a marketing tool; and, it bothers me when other people seem to be doing just that. I don’t want people to read me because I work at a certain place. I want people to read me because they find value in what I write. Sure, where I work might add to my credentials, but I think what’s more valuable is that I’ve been in news librarianship for 8 years, I keep up with some professional development reading, and I can offer breadth because I share more in this space than just stuff about news libraries/news librarianship.

In the news library world, I don’t get bonus credentials for working where I work, so it’s particularly odd to learn that someone thinks that I do. If I worked at a prestigous news organization, like National Public Radio, the BBC, The New York Times, CNN, National Geographic, etc., etc., then I’d get bonus credentials. Being a news librarian in a funky, nontraditional position at a university just elicits strange looks and lots of questions.

I think they also capitalized the listing in the directory. I vaguely remember being very pleased that they left j’s scratchpad lowercase–my preferred way of seeing it listed–and since a site that borrowed their content has it lowercase, I think they initially had it lowercase. I understand lots of places won’t capitalize it for stylistic reasons, so I’m always happy to see it lowercase.

What will be fun is watching the search engines and other directories to see if they update and if so, how quickly that will be.

I’m starting to find it less irritating and more amusing. At least I tried in a good faith effort to remove any reference to my employer from the listing.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 11th, 2005 at 4:38 pm and is filed under About this Weblog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.