My Home Institution in the News

It's lovely to walk into work on an unseasonably warm day and be greeted by excellent front-page coverage of my place of work:

Boston Public Library (and other libraries) move with the times. A focus on "new" programming initiatives to keep libraries relevant. Nothing genuinely new, but some good front-page publicity at any rate.

Libraries Shun Deals to Place Books on Web is a misleading title, because what they're "shunning" is the commercial deals. BPL and other libraries are choosing to go with Open Content Alliance over Google and Microsoft.

Mail Call!

And, while writing up the above, I received my complimentary T-shirt for registering as a presenter with PBWiki. That is neat in and of itself, but the T-shirt "was imprinted at Rebuild Resources, a place where men and women struggling with drug and alcohol addiction come to change their lives through work, hope, and courage." (from the hang tag)

Promoting a 2.0 resource and supporting socially responsible companies. Twice as much awesome and double the fun!

InfoClutter is Tamed!

All right, that might be a bit of an exaggeration, but the first presentation of my "Taming the Online InfoClutter" workshop was a rousing success. Six librarians joined me for two jam-packed hours of RSS feeds, organizing schema and discussions of generational differences (computer generations, that is!). I had a lovely time and thus far all the feedback has been outstanding.

As promised, the slides for the presentation are here. I used Google Docs Presentation software and found it to be an excellent basic presentation tool. No, it doesn't have the bells and whistles of PowerPoint, but the ability to pull up my slides anywhere I can get net makes it indispensible.

Also, use the infoclutter tag over on the right there to find everything I've written on this topic. I've linked to a number of articles on optimizing your RSS reader and finding ways to cut through the noise.

Now, on to Internet Librarian and finding some way to take 2 solid hours and pare it down to 13 minutes...yikes!

More resources for InfoClutter

A great collection of articles on staying on top and organized.

Books Consulted (yes, really!)

The Personal Efficiency Program, Kerry Gleeson, 2nd ed.
Time Management for Dummies, Jeffrey J. Mayer, 2nd ed.
Take Back Your Time, Jan Jasper.
Getting Organized at Work, Dawn B. Sova, PhD with Robert Gregor.

Now that I'm up against the wire, that'll probably be it for new resources. On to the main event!

PoliticalBase - a new take on wiki workings

Techcrunch reports that CNET founder Shelby Bonnie has a new startup: PoliticalBase. From the article:
"PoliticalBase is a structured Wiki that encourages research and debate. Users can edit most of the text but can’t change the underlying database structure. That allows the site to slice and dice data for comparison purposes (something that can’t be done with the free-for-all Wikipedia) but still gives the site’s community the ability to create and edit content."

Obviously timed for the 2008 presidential race, this would be a great resource to promote to our politically active and interested patrons. It's also a very interesting example of a seriously moderated wiki, where the content is available for editing but the underlying structure isn't. This allows the site maintainers to use stable pages for remixing information and efficiently comparing like things.

Fascinating tech development, useful resource and all-around neat idea. Let me know if you play with it and what you think, eh?

List of resources for Taming the Infoclutter

Somewhat random, but useful stuff. Also, a work in progress.

Do email and RSS just once a day: Generally useful and commonsense advice, Rule 7 & 8 are about RSS, and the comments are full of examples on how other people do it.

Firefox ticker addon: big distraction or useful tool?

Gain Insight into Your Reading Habits w/Google Reader Trends

RSS Brief

"Animal House style" it may not be, but the idea of a "Probation" folder for new feeds is neat.

If you're in a time-sensitive industry, sending your RSS feeds as an SMS message may be the ticket.

Priority vs. Content? Google Reader doesn't make you choose one.

7 Things You Should Know About RSS, from Educause.

IL2007 CyberTours list published

Here's the complete list of CyberTours at Internet Librarian 2007. (I'm down near the bottom, on Wednesday the 31st.) If you're at the conference, stop by and say Hi!

An eclectic moment

Yup, we love wading through Bloglines, we do. Here's a few of today's standouts:

So You Think You're An Expert Academic Librarian over at the ACRL blog. It's an analysis of a Harvard Business Review on 'being an expert,' as interpreted by librarians. Good for folks doing professional development/CE work.

Legal and Ethical Link Blogging": what looks to be an excellent primer on this topic.

Learn to Blow Your Own Horn, from the Performancing blog. It's targeted to bloggers, but librarians usually aren't the best at this aspect of their jobs, either.

Book Review: Library 2.0 by Casey & Savastinuk

I've been slowly chewing on Library 2.0: A guide to participatory library service by Michael Casey & Laura Savastinuk and finally finished it this morning. As a review or primer, it's fantastic. It's exactly the book to hand to a senior administrator or library trustee who is willing to read it (=relatively open-minded about new initiatives). The authors explain the basics of Library 2.0 and describe the distinctions between the theory behind participatory library service (Library 2.0) and the technology that can support it (Web 2.0). The writing can be somewhat repetitive, particularly toward the end, but that might just be because they were telling me lots of things I already knew.

Many of the changes outlined in this book are things I've seen the beginnings of in my own institution. Service review teams that cut across staff lines vertically and horizontally; a verbalized commitment to openness and trust of one's staff at all levels; a recognition of the need for constant, moderate, moderated change; and more. All of these are components of Library 2.0 and are described in some depth. The final chapters on Getting Buy-In and Maintaining Momentum are particularly useful for those of us who are trying to push foward some of these changes and need advice for the next step in the process.

In short: a good summary for those already on the Lib 2.0 cluetrain, and a reasonable first book for the as-yet unconvinced. I recommended it to two senior-level managers just this morning, and their first response was to suggest that the whole management team needed individual copies. Rah!

Enjoy!

Whither thou goest, librarian?

Ah, productivity. I'm so glad to find it again...

And yet, no posts in a month and a half? I guess the short answer is that I did find my productivity, but it largely played out in my paying job and not in these pages. Also, there's been a post brewing that needs out, and it's finally ready.

But first, announcements: In the next two months, I have three professional speaking engagements, two local and one at a national conference!

Tuesday, October 16th: I'll be presenting a two-hour workshop on "Taming the Online Infoclutter: Using RSS to Keep Current and Manage Overload". 10a - 12noon at the Boston Public Library, Training Room. Registration is through the Boston Region.

Wednesday, October 31st: On the last day of Internet Librarian, I'm giving a 15-minute Cybertour on the same topic. 11:30-11:45am in the Exhibitor Hall. (Yes, I'm speaking at a national librarian conference. How excited am I?!?)

Tuesday, November 6th: My second workshop for the Boston Region is "You Can Be the Expert: Helping Library Users with Basic Computer Troubleshooting," a look at how to diagnose what problem your patrons are having and what, if anything, you can do about it. 10a - 12noon at the BPL Training Room. Same registration link as above.

Next up, a post sure to raise some eyebrows and make you think. Ciao!

As promised...it's August and I'm back

Hi, all. My thanks for your patience for the radio silence. But now, the show is over and I'm refocusing my attention on my blog.

To ease myself back in, I'll start off with a couple of links from Bloglines:

Headlines and hotspots in a just a Couple of Minutes. via LibraryStuff

Using LinkedIn productively via the Librarian In Black

You can find me on LinkedIn, by the way ------>

I've also added a couple of titles to the Squidoo list ---->

Ah, productivity. I'm so glad to find it again...