Hi.  My name is Sarah and I’m spending the next nine or so months as a Fellow in the Library Innovation Lab and Affiliate of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.

What does that mean?  GOOD QUESTION.  And, in part, why I have decided to start this blog.

I have been granted an enormous amount of freedom to do whatever the heck I want during this period of time.  It’s exhilarating and terrifying.  I have a ton of ideas and yet, at the same time,  I have this nightmare that I’ll get to June and all of the sudden I’ll realize that I’ve done nothing.  Or appear to have done nothing.   I’m trying to become comfortable with the fact that I will have many dead ends and “failures” during this period of time.  And that I will be spending some if not much time on research versus product creation.  After a few years in industry, I have fallen out of comfort with the idea of critique and research and, well, THINKING, as being a valuable contributions to an effort.

In the spirit of openness and transparency and accountability, I have decided to keep an “open notebook” of my adventures here in Cambridge (and beyond) where I will maintain a record of what I’m doing/thinking/worrying about.  This is also scary – what if people think what I’m working on is dumb and/or steal my ideas?  But I’m willing to take the risk in order to gain the benefits of working in the open – hopefully I’ll get useful feedback from those following along and any good ideas that I do come up with will be spread out and used more quickly.

I’m still going to maintain my primary blog for the analysis pieces coming out of my research and other topical blog posts.  This is truly going to be a messy notebook, with sketches, incomplete thoughts and whatnot.

So welcome.