The Other Librarian

There have been a few, ahem, debates going around and I could make a post on each of them, but things have just been too much in my home life recently, so I’m going to chime in one on one.
MLS or non-MLS?
My favorite call on this issue is coming from Dorothea Salo, but there [...]

One of my favorite Monty Python works, is the famous “Accountancy Shanty” coming from Monty Python’s Meaning of Life. With the lyrics “It’s fun to charter an accountant and sail the wide accountant-sea,” it’s obviously a satirical look at the idiosyncracies of your friendly neighbourhood bean counter.
Five Accountant-ish Things for Librarians to Know
Well, [...]

Ten more ideas about how I can make my life better, in libraries and elsewhere:

 Plan an unconference — somewhere, somehow.

The field needs more unconferences, and I’d like to host/organize one for local librarians this year — probably in the summer sometime.

 More controlled and productive computer time.

No, this has nothing to do with social software.   I [...]

This is kind of like the “day in the life of” except it is a “night in the life of.” I can’t remember the times, but consider that most of this stuff happened between 8pm last night (Tuesday) until I posted the final blog post today.

I logged onto Meebo for fun.
I chatted [...]

 
Designing an organization is not something that managers should take on without a good deal of thought. Unfortunately, the coverage of organizational design in library management courses is often simplified to a toying around with two organizational dichotomies: flat or hierarchical; centralized or decentralized. The impression you get from such a surface [...]

So I stopped into the Uncontrolled Vocabulary live discussion forum only to be told that they were previously discussing my “We Asked for 2.0 Libraries” post from a few days ago. Besides being a bit surprised (though after today I have discovered that the post has potential to beat out my “no brainer” [...]

I keep saying this, but subscribe to the CBC Ideas podcast.  Do it.   Right now.   It is probably the best podcast that is not related to celebrity, comedy or music.
A new series, called the “Kings of Philantropy” is about to be nixed from the list (Ideas only keeps about 4 podcasts up on its site [...]

As I mentioned before (more than once for some reason), I was at the CLA Emerging Technologies Pre-conference and did a presentation called “Library 2.0 is the Answer!  Now what are the questions again?”
In my presentation, I wanted to come up with a definition for L2 that focussed on strategy or actions rather than theory [...]

When I wrote my “Technology requests ought to begin with a ‘yes’” post, my intention was to highlight a dialectic between those who want to fight the so-called “culture of ‘no’” and those who want to emphasize the need for planning and sustainability. My argument was that technology has changed (and I stated [...]

There is nothing like a good old fashioned 2 by 2 matrix to make someone look really slick about something, isn’t there? I’ll have to admit, this one is pretty obvious. You have two sides to a situation. Sometimes things cost alot. Sometimes things require considerable cultural change in an organization in order to be [...]