Farewell to Rule Number One

Dear Readers,

We’re writing with some bittersweet news: as of April 17, 2018,  we’re going to be closing up shop here at Rule Number One. Though we plan to keep the blog up as a record of … well, the blog … we aren’t planning any new posts here.

When we started the blog – about five years ago, when we we both just out of library school – our main purpose was just to create a reason to stay in touch and work on a project together. Neither of us had any pretensions that we were doing anything but shouting out into the silences of the internet, but just in case anyone was listening, we were excited to put our perspective out there.  Never in a million years could we have anticipated what this little project turned into: articles, presentations, and the book that we recently published with the American Library Association, Learner-Centered Pedagogy.  We’ve been truly grateful (and surprised!) by the reception to our work here.

So why end Rule Number One?

We just have a sense that it’s to time to end this particular collaboration. One of our main goals for starting the blog was to get our perspective (a learner-centered approach driven by the cognitive science of learning and humanistic psychology) out there in libraries. And now we feel that we’ve done that, both here and in our book. This is not to say that we think it’s perfect, or great, or done, or that everyone has now adopted its methods and ideas and we can retire into library instruction infamy. We’re probably not even totally done with these ideas, but now we’d like to explore both these ideas and other things in new ways. We’re so psyched we got to do this together for as long as we did and we hope we’ll collaborate in different ways in the future, but this chapter feels like it’s closing.

Honestly, we’re different people at very different places in life than we were five years ago, just out of library school. There’s new jobs, spouses, kids, moves across the country… It’s been a challenge to keep up with the blog, and we feel like we’re not doing it justice anymore, with rare posts and limited engagement. We don’t want to leave it hanging, so it seems better to wrap it up.

It’s been hard to make this decision, which is why there’s been silence for so long. We feel sad, but also sort of liberated. We’re glad we’ve been able to do this thing, together, and that you’ve been kind enough to join us for the journey.

If you want to find us, you can always send us an e-mail or find us on Twitter (@danibcook and @k_m_klipfel),  and we would love it if you say hi if you ever run into us at a conference.

…And with that, we bid you a fond and grateful farewell, at least on this particular WordPress site.

We’ll see you when we see you,

Kevin and Dani

Rule # 1: A Library Blog Co-Bloggers

2012-2018