As mentioned in the previous post, this is the first of what I intend to be an irregular series of interviews.

I first became aware of Derik Badman when I saw the sketch he did of Meredith Farkas at the 2007 Computers in Libraries conference. Since then, I have begun following his personal blog (mostly about comics), his webcomic, Things Change, and the group library blog that Derik writes for, In the Library with the Lead Pipe. In his day job, he is the Digital Services Librarian at Temple University in Philadelphia.

I got a chance to talk to Derik during a break at the recent Computers in Libraries conference. We started our conversation by talking about that blog, which has made a name for itself rather quickly with its relatively novel approach to blogging: regular publication (at first one new post every week, now every other week) of longer essays that are peer-reviewed by other members of the group blog as well as outside readers.

Drawings of In the Library with the Lead Pipe authors by Derik Badman

Steve: So right when everybody was saying “blogs are dead, the library blogosphere is out of gas,” you and a bunch of other people started In the Library with the Lead Pipe. Why’d you do that?

Derik: I can’t take credit for the why. That came from Kim Leeder, who is out at Boise State, and Brett Bonfield who is at the Collingswood Public Library in New Jersey. The idea is we wanted to do something that was somewhere between blogging and writing for journals. We wanted to try and create a model that is more open, that is free, but that also has some kind of peer review and authority to it. We wanted to do longer posts, but there is the worry that people don’t want to read long posts on the web. We said we were going to do it weekly and we just switched to bi-weekly because even those of us involved would be saying “I’m still two posts behind in reading.”

It’s an ongoing, evolving experiment. We’ll see how it goes.

Steve: Well, how is it going? What do you think you are gaining from the peer review and the longer posts?

Derik: The peer review I think has been really helpful. We get at least one person in the group and at least one person outside of the group to read every post before it gets published. The real purpose of peer review is you get to see your writing from a different angle. Some people will say “oh, that’s a really interesting avenue, you should have talked about that more,” or “maybe you don’t need that.” It definitely makes the writing better.

Steve: It seems like the blog has gotten a good response.

Derik: We worked a little bit to get people to link to us by using our social networks, which was very helpful.

Steve: You also write about comics, and you do your own webcomic. How does the webcomic compare to writing and doing other stuff for the web? You keep a pretty strict schedule for the comic?

Strip from the “Mars and Venus” section of Derik’s webcomic, Things Change. Click the comic to view full size at the Things Change site.

Derik: Yes. Of all the things I do, that’s the thing that I always make sure is on the schedule. I’m not on a schedule for my blog and my writing. But the webcomic, I made the schedule and you gotta stick with it, that’s just something that’s expected. You gotta do it if you are going to do the comic and keep people paying attention.

There’s no time to stop, I just have to keep producing, regardless. Even if I have to cut corners and copy and paste something or use the same background twice–which I did before coming here because I was thinking “I gotta get stuff done for while I’m away!”–I still get the stuff done and I make progress, because that’s the goal, to create a body of work.

Strip from the “Pentheus and Bacchus” section of Derik’s webcomic, Things Change. Click the image to view full size at the Things Change site.

Steve: I am trying to draw a parallel between this and the library blogging. Is blogging an end in iteslf or is it a means to get noticed? With your web comic, obviously you are putting so much work into it that it must be satisfying in and of itself. Are you trying to promote yourself for other kinds of work with that or is that the medium that you like?

Derik: It is an end in itself and it is something I really like. I think the main step past that would be getting an actual book published of the webcomic. It’s more about the work. I don’t think I have a ton of readers, but it’s what I like to do more than any library stuff I do. If I could retire and just draw comics, I totally would.

Steve: Do you see much of a connection between the library stuff you do and the comics stuff that you do, or do you think of them as separate spheres?

Derik: I have mostly thought of them as separate spheres. I guess there are times where they start to intersect, like drawing at conferences. Which is kind of one of those “do something as a way to get somewhere else.” I do it for fun, but it also became this way that I met people and networked more.

A page of Derik’s illustrated notes from Computers in Libraries 2009.

Steve: People notice that.

Derik: Yeah. There’s probably tons of people that I would never have met, but they were like “oh, your drawings are cool.” So that’s kind of neat. I’d like to work it more into my actual work at my library. I have been thinking about how I might use comics in an instructional context, like by explaining Boolean logic in comics. The visual aspect would make it clearer than anything else I could do to try to explain it.

Steve: One of the cool things about that is–if this were something you wanted to do–we were talking before about libraries duplicating effort, so if you wanted to…

Derik: I could share it out…

Steve: …and if you CC-licensed it or whatever people could use it. If you did it in a way that was really understandable, people would use that all the time.

Derik: Actually, on Saturday I had an art show up in Second Life and I was talking about it and somebody there asked me about the library-comics crossover, and I mentioned how I had this weird idea about Boolean comics, and there was another librarian there who was like “I would totally buy that!”

Steve: Tell me more about the Second Life presentations.

Derik: My total experience in Second Life thus far has been public speaking, which is interesting. I was talking about webcomic art, and on my screen the images were smaller than you would normally see them on my site. But through the viewer of Second Life, they are like two times the size of a person. And with that kind of secondary scale, it just made them look really cool, like Stonehenge or billboard comics. I could never do that in real life. It would not even be technically feasible because I just don’t draw them at the resolution to where you could blow them up that way. So that was fun.

Derik’s Second Life avatar admires the Stonehenge-sized comics.

It opened my eyes to one valuable use of that virtual world environment. It’s definitely more social than a webinar or a lot of that junk. It’s not the same as coming to an actual conference and talking to people, but considering how much travel budgets have been cut lately, it might be something we see more of. It was certainly more interesting than the ACRL Virtual Conference. Calling that a “virtual conference” seems a little dicey.

The Second Life art show was part of a “virtual worlds in education” conference. It’s kind of weird, because every time I hear that there’s some kind of Second Life conference it’s always about using Second Life for something. It’s always so strangely meta, like they can’t say “let’s use this tool to talk about other stuff,” it’s always like “we gotta use this to talk about this.”

Steve: OK, last question: what does it feel like to come to a conference and know you aren’t going to meet anyone with a cooler name than “Derik Badman?”

Derik: [Laughs] I don’t know. People always say things like “oh, I bet they made fun of you as a kid” or “I bet people thought your name was cool as a kid.” When I was a kid, no one ever made jokes or anything. It has always been completely normal. It’s all metacommentary on the name and not actual commentary. It is my real name, though. I did not make that up.