My last day in the office is tomorrow and then I tackle the job of moving in earnest. I expect things will be quiet here for a while. I’m cleaning out my del.icio.us bookmarks as well as my files; here are a few pages for your amusement:
Yahoo! vs. Google search results - visualize the difference
Talk to a person - “The gethuman project is a consumer movement to improve the quality of phone support in the US”
From this Thingology post:
Some day, if we have enough shared users [with Cork’d], LibraryThing can recommend books based on the wines you drink!
Awesome!
In the course of wrapping up at Binghamton, I’ve needed to save quite a bit of professional e-mail, mainly correspondence related to presentations, articles, the list I manage. I also want to maintain several discussion list subscriptions that I’ve had through my work account.
So, I set up a new Gmail account just for professional but not strictly work-related e-mail, and boy, do I wish I had done it a long time ago! I would have saved myself the hassle of having to print, save, or forward messages that I now want to keep beyond my tenure at BU. And, more important to work productivity, traffic from several high-volume lists is now diverted from my work account, significantly lowering the e-mail distraction factor. Although I felt ambivalent about having yet another e-mail account, it’s worked out very well and I highly recommend the strategy.
I’m in the process of setting up an e-mail form (and some other stuff) on this site, so stay tuned if you want to contact me.
I’ve been cleaning out files and came across some real gems among my papers from a supervisory workshop I attended several years ago. One document, included for its shock value, is an excerpt from a WWII-era article about “Getting More Efficiency Out of Women Employees.” Among the “helpful tips” are:
2. When you have to use older women, try to get ones who have worked outside the home… Older women who have never contacted the public have a hard time adapting themselves and are inclined to be cantankerous and fussy.
8. Give every girl an adequate number of rest periods during the day. You have to make some allowances for feminine psychology.
11. Get enough size variety in operator’s uniforms so that each girl can have a proper fit. This point can’t be stressed too much in keeping women happy.
As I recall, the piece was included for its outrageousness and its effect in breaking the proverbial ice. But clipped together with it is another list of tips, handed out with no apparent irony or second thought: “Management Tips for Generation Xers.”
3. They want jobs that are cool, fun and fulfilling.
6. Unlike baby boomers who tend to work independently, Generation Xers like to work in a team environment.
7. They prefer learning by doing and making mistakes as they go along.
Puh-leeze! Is it really a good idea to take an entire gender, generation, or other group and make generalizations about what does and does not float their boats in the work environment? I implied in an earlier post that everyone should just lighten up about librarian stereotypes, or at least realize that we’re hardly the only profession to suffer at the hands of the media, and I meant it. But observations of the sort above need to be taken with a very large grain of salt. Even if 95% of Gen Xers want a job that is “cool, fun and fulfilling,” a) that means entirely different things to different people and b) you may supervise someone in the 5% that doesn’t care about cool or fun, but likes routine. To me, fulfillment does not mean making mistakes as I go along if I can at all avoid it. That’s why I still can’t drive stick shift!
On a related note, I’ve heard many comments over the past few years, both in the workplace and out, that imply that anyone younger than a Gen Xer comes complete with a full set of technology skills. This is not the case. Technology skills are still add ons, like Barbie’s dream house, and they come in many flavors. The person who connects her iPod to her computer in order to listen to music is not necessarily a person who wants to take her iPod apart or understand how it works, no matter how old she is. People who grow up around something, e.g. a computer, may be more comfortable with it, but the best way to find out is to ask, and comfort does not equate to a career in technical support.
I believe that the best managers have an ability to assess an individual’s strengths and weaknesses without making the mental shortcuts exemplified by the above tip lists–and then, to the extent possible, match the job and the person, no matter what their age or gender!
My SUNY colleagues in Oswego have found a professional use for all that snow they have: send the newest librarian up to the top of a very large snow bank and take her picture! Emily Hart, reference and instruction librarian and native Oswegonian, reports, “I’m not sure how tall it was…big! There was a significant drop on the other side :o” Will this trend catch on at libraries across the midwest and northeast?
I’ve added Feedburner’s e-mail subscription option over on the right side of the page. If you use it, please let me know how it works.
Some musicians and bands have been a fleeting presence in my life, easily evoking a very particular time or experience whenever I hear their music. Others have stayed with me as lifelong friends, following me through college and grad school, into marriage and professional life. Here it seems appropriate to invoke Dar Williams, whose music has been with me for at least 10 years:
Have I got everything ? Am I ready to go?
Is it gonna be wild, is it gonna be the best time
Or am I just a-saying so?
Am I ready to go?*
Next month, I’ll be moving to Boston to take a position as Verde Implementation Librarian with Ex Libris. I’m happy about this move on so many levels: I get the chance to use my years of erm experience (that’s lower case for a reason–the system was in my head!) and combine that with interests in project management, training, and general rooting-around-the-system, and my spouse and I will get to live in the same city again.**
What will I miss, besides Binghamton’s housing prices? A stellar group of colleagues here, many of whom have played a major role in my professional growth and development, and who are always pushing the boundaries of what one person and one library can do within the parameters of state government. 
It’s been a pleasure to work with you.
How about the blog? I don’t expect it to change much, although my professional interests certainly impact what I write about. And things may be quiet for a bit as I wrap up at Binghamton, go apartment hunting, move, and start the new job. I think that will be enough to do for a while!
—
* “Traveling Again” from The Honesty Room. I should hasten to add, for those familiar with Dar, that most of the song’s lyrics do not apply to this situation.
** He’s been doing a fellowship at Johns Hopkins for the past 18 months.
We work with a lot of different vendors at MPOW (my place of work). Various parts of our e-resource administration and access are powered by products from Ex Libris, Serials Solutions, and III. (We are currently a development partner for Encore by III, but I can’t say any more about that or we’ll all have to spend the next few months quarantined in Emeryville, which actually sounds pretty good given today’s forecast.) We also just launched a Grokker visualization interface for some of our e-resources; you may be familiar with Grokker if your library licenses Ebsco databases.
It’s been interesting to work with all these different tools and interfaces on the one hand, and to hear talk about everything going modular on the other hand. We have a set up that works for us, but it just ain’t that easy to get all our systems talking to each other in the current environment. ILSs are from Mars, ERMs are from Venus. It’s challenging enough to get accurate information when your link resolver and the catalog it’s querying are made by the same company; start throwing other systems into the mix and everyone is likely to end up in counseling.
Everyone wants their products to integrate so that they can expand their markets; no one wants to share too much so that there’s an incentive to stand by your vendor. I’m curious to see where things are really headed.
I had heard of E-LIS but forgot about it. From the site:
E-LIS relies on the voluntary work of individuals from a wide range of backgrounds and is non-commercial. It is not a funded project of an organization. It is community-owned and community-driven. We serve LIS researchers by facilitating their self-archiving, ensuring the long-term preservation of their documents and by providing word-wide easy access to their papers.
If you publish, consider putting a copy of your pre-print (or post-print) into E-LIS so that everyone can have access.
It’s been around since last August, but it was news to me (via Lorcan Dempsey’s weblog) that CrossRef has a blog. It looks like posting is picking up in the new year. The tagline is “publishers, collaboration, innovation” and apparently any CrossRef member can contribute.