Wednesday, May 30, 2007

ramble on social news

Hey Now! great post at TechCrunch
announces the re-birth of dead.net as a social site. To quote them:
"...Dead.net is transitioning to a new hosting environment..."

so cool...
update: really, check it out, it's great!

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Monday, May 21, 2007

Further

OK, enough repetitive, sorry posts about navel gazing pain. Thought I'd bring up a nice positive bit of progress resulting directly from my persistent use of an RSS aggregator. We have been buried (truly) in forms and spreadsheets lately and all of us are really getting burned out on paperwork. But today, we had to present a short regurgitation of statistical info to represent "A Day In The Life Of insert library here". Examples were provided to us that would bring us to present data looking like this:

Visitors: 3,585
Circulation: 4,986
Total Program Attendance: 242
PC Sign-ups: 764
Web page Hits: 697
Database Searches: 656

But after reading Jill's brilliant post on IBS, a few of us to a couple of minutes to repackage it for non-librarians, and this is what we submitted:

3,585 people connected with ideas, information and their community by visiting the library.
4,986 items went home with citizens to enrich their home and work lives.
242 patrons of all ages shared their community’s diverse cultural life by attending a library program.
764 library users connected with the world and their full potential through the use of a public computer.
697 people started their quest for trusted information by visiting the library web page.
656 queries of our research databases helped the citizens support their lifelong learning efforts.

I love Library Marketing - Thinking Outside the Book ... It's on my "every day" list.

It's just an up moment when a little reading has a good little effect on a little task at hand.
Tada! Our library is human!
Made us all really proud.

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Thursday, May 10, 2007

Excusez la.

Man, this is embarrassing. I start writing, save as draft, chicken out, repeat...
I have never been one to censor myself, I swear, I don't know what's wrong with me these days. People are doing great stuff everywhere... What's up with me?

I have been wrestling with ideas of efficiency, cost cutting measures and human sensibilities. The emphasis here is on the wrestling. I always juggle thoughts of efficiencies and cost cuttings. I usually don't wrestle with these thoughts, they have been part of my work for over 10 years. Lately though, everything seems different and people are defensive, sectarian (yep, I said it) and can no longer think beyond one possibility or another for the sake of consistency and balance.

Perspective! It's always my focus in all the training I give. It's always my need when deploying systems and it's still what I seek when faced with hard decisions. Why is it that some can't look beyond their shoe tips? We need to make solid choices based on long term objectives, even when the goal is immediate result.

We cannot hope that if we stop serving some users who are not "prepared enough for us" or who "create the largest workload" or worst yet, who "come to us for just anything" ( I really heard that one once!) we will have succeeded in managing our services. Yes, staff will feel relief if there are shorter lines, but how will they feel as lines get shorter and shorter.

I am not trying to preserve the "perfect" library we had 2 or 3 years ago, I am trying to preserve the great one we can have 5 and 10 years form now.

See, this is the type of post I usually write and delete. Too many "I"s in it. Way too editorial and self indulging. Feels like I am chasing my tail. But here goes. Maybe now it will be out of my system. Excusez la.


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