Dear somewhat-still-new librarian who did not receive a banana slicer (per a recent realia-based meme in which Some People were anonymously mailed banana slicers), was not anointed as a Mover & Shaker, has not been tapped for Emerging Leader, ran and lost for an association office or didn’t even get nominated in the first place, [...]
I’m one of the vast majority of MOOC drop-outs, but in my case my course abandonment had two causes: 1. By the end of the 5th section, I had learned as much math as I need to know for the moment. What I wish for (and it probably exists) is an app or website that [...]
I’m sitting in the jury assembly room in San Francisco thinking about two historical moments: today’s DOMA case at the Supreme Court, and the singularly principled action of the editorial board of the Journal of Library Administration, which resigned en masse after concluding that “it is not possible to produce a quality journal under the [...]
I’m up, up, up in the air, flying over the Southwest as I head to Albuquerque and then Santa Fe for a quick visit with my mother. Sandy was able to visit her in January during a business trip, and now I’m the one with the precious combination of time and opportunity. I would be [...]
This is a smattering of lessons I keep rediscovering in management, which I felt like summarizing as I tick into a new calendar year. A lot of it is obvious, very little of it is new to me (and some of it has been said here before) — but management seems to consist of relearning [...]
This past week we had a visitor in the library who (completely without guile) commented that the library felt very dated and dowdy. He didn’t use the word “dowdy,” but it hung in the air nonetheless, while I shrank in my seat. I had just finished bragging about how much space we had opened up [...]
I took gobs of photos in New Zealand with both my iPhone and my unwieldy quasi-prosumer Kodak (sometimes cantankerous, sometimes great photos). But except for the rare Antipodean posting, only in the last 24 hours have I moved these pictures from devices to cloud storage, and at that, with only the barest metadata and organization. [...]
I set aside my pre-LIANZA preparation to note that the theme for the past several weeks in LibraryLand is: be bold. (Warning, the following blog post is a babblish mish-mosh; I’m so busy I had to abandon plans to brew the White House beer for a local competition, let alone structure or revise this writing.) [...]
In the few spare moments I am allotted, I’ve been working on an article (a weekend project, as my weekday pattern is commute-work-work-work-commute-gym-eat-sleep-repeat), but in the back of my brain I’ve wanted to follow up on OCLC’s un-hire of of Jack Blount, particularly in light of my “I am the man” post several weeks back. [...]
Sarah has a great post about her transition to library administrator. Because she feels awkward in that cloth she’ll likely do great. Naturally, being The Man myself (a few times over), I have my own twist on her observations. There’s a fine line between being transparent and over-sharing. I don’t believe in transparency so much [...]
