Blog about Libraries

I am basically lazy, so that tells you why I would probably use the Library Thing Tag Cloud as a collection development tool. The bigger the word, the more I'd buy.

I have a staff member who pretty much rocks when it comes to creating displays. Check out this one, which was created for our Winter Reading Program. What you can't see is that the bed spread is actually a quilt, made from scanned images of book covers, conceived and hand crafted by staff of the library.

I am guessing the article in this morning's New York Times will give some people a reason to bash the Radical Trust concept around for a while. And maybe that's not such a bad thing. Not that I don't admire the idea of putting my trust in the collective mindset, but I also want to maintain a proper, deliberate perspective about where and how new tools are used to help my patrons experience, navigate and manage information.

I don't recall Jimmy Wales ever claiming that Wikipedia should be used exclusively for research and I doubt that any sane librarian would either. However, the message that there there are important and critical contributions information professionals can make in particular is difficult to articulate effectively, given the truly overwhelming success people actually do have with something like Wikipedia. After all, if someone finds what they need, regardless of whether we could have gotten them more or better data, it's their call as to whether it meets their needs, and that is what makes Wikipedia so successful.

Wikipedia is based on the very sound principle that for the most part we should trust patrons to create and add value to knowledge, and that we should trust them to determine what satisfies their information needs. Nevertheless, I come to work everyday because my professional expertise is also worth something (well, at least I think it is!). If I am unable to position my services or my resources in a way that gets the patrons' attention, then it's my problem to make them more appealing. And it is also my responsibility to differentiate cleary why my tools (or my brain) is smarter to use than something else. Maybe it's good for us in libraryland that this issue is on the front page of the NYT. This seems like an opportunity for those of us who spend our lives managing knowledge for a living, and it ought to get us thinking about the contributions we offer and how they should be marketed to our communities.

Been away for a while. Went down to Pawleys to pick up the fam, who have been there for a month...trashing my parents's place. Not really, but it did take a few days to pick up all the toys and stuff before we left for the heartland.
I'll get something up here this weekend if all goes well.

Michael Casey wrote a nice entry on the 28th about vertical teams as a tool for implementing change. He discusses the necessity of getting people throughout the hierarchy of an organization involved in new projects. It boils down to this quote, if you ask me:

There are many ways to integrate change into an organization’s structure, but my favorite way to is to create an environment where customers and staff are involved in facilitating change and maintaining the ability to change at all levels.

I agree with the customer input, but that's for another post. Sticking with the staff issue, I think the mentality Casey mentiones has to prevail in order for an organization to be prepared to deal with change in general, and by this I mean not just for projects but for the state of semi-chaos that the rapidly evolving state of technology creates . If an organization doesn't promote and encourage staff to adopt, experiment with, use and innovate with the toys then they risk ending up with a staff that prefers inertia. And if an organization can't get away from the mindset of not allowing people to learn about tools that don't specifically apply to their jobs, then they put a lid on a potentially valuable source of new ideas. Worse yet, they risk losing the valuable change agents in their library. No, check that...they will lose them.

I am leaving out another really important topic, but I only have a few minutes today. Nevertheless, it also needs to be said that there are obviously lots of people in every organization who are not change agents. If the organization doesn't support a training culture to provide those people the opportunities to keep up, then they don't have any right to complain that their staff are inertia bound.