The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) has issued a new report titled Strategic Thinking Guide for Academic Librarians in the New Economy (pdf).

It joins the growing chorus of reports that indicate that we are in for a financially tight stretch in the near future.  As I mentioned earlier, everyone in libraries needs to think about what we do and how we do it, and find ways to be more efficient.

The greatest opportunities for most of us lies in the area of Open Source and Web 2.0.  By taking the time now to move from proprietary services and software to low- or no-cost self-hosted solutions, libraries can not only save money, but add functionality and features.

The critical aspect is to think incrementally… tackling a too-large project all at once invites stress and failure; adding or changing some specific functionality each month can mean that in one year you may have ten solid new applications which were implemented in a very cost-effective manner.

Read the report, and add their suggestions to your pool of ideas.

found via ResourceShelf

The Map of Knowledge is a visualization of the interconnectedness of various scientfic disciplines.  From the PloS ONE article:

Over the course of 2007 and 2008, we collected nearly 1 billion user interactions recorded by the scholarly web portals of some of the most significant publishers, aggregators and institutional consortia.

High-quality images of the map.

found via posts by William (Bill) Drew and Robert L. Balliot on the Web4Lib list

Always be aware of your local history, and keep an eye on popular culture.  My former stomping ground of DeKalb, Illinois played a pivotal part in the real-life tragedy that inspired the recently-released movie “Changeling“.  Kudos to historian Phyllis Kelley (full disclosure:  I worked with her daughter, Librarian Patsy Lundberg) for being a key member of the group which built the Joiner History Room collection that allows for such gems to be unearthed.

The DeKalb Daily Chronicle has the story, as does the Chicago Tribune.

Thanks to Patsy for the heads-up!

Issuu (not a typo) is a new PDF web publishing service, and it is a very good service.  You can upload a document in PDF format, and Issuu presents it in a reader that is both intuitive and easy to use.

As an alternative to Google Docs or Scribd (both also excellent services) Issuu is well worth exploring.

found via PDF World

If you are reading this, then something has gone right!  I fought with the backup for nearly a week before giving up, and have rebuilt the blog from another method entirely.  This resulted in many duplicate entries, and it really messed up the post numbering scheme – so all links into this blog are currently dead

The good news is that everything seems to be here, and it seems to be working.  The entire blog has been moved to the Libology server, and the LibrarySupportStaff.org domain has been transfered.  This means that there are two links to this blog:

http://blog.librarysupportstaff.org/ (not yet linking to the new installation)

and

http://www.libology.com/blog/

Hopefully both will work equally well.  There may be a re-design in the works as well… one step at a time.

Thank you, loyal readers, for your patience.  I hope to soon be posting some of the interesting things that I have encountered in the past 11 days!

Eight Tips for Healthy Meetings is a post by Karen, a.k.a. Free Range Librarian.

Having spent a fair amount of time in meetings both good and bad, these are excellent guidelines for increasing one’s chances for running a productive and useful meeting.  Meetings are best when they are casual, friendly and open, but structured enough to keep the group on task; this can be a balancing act for the person wielding the gavel.

Alaskan bears now have a webcam, complements of National Geographic.  It is very compelling to watch… sort of like the Discovery channel, but with the awareness that it is streaming live.

from ResourceShelf

Just installed WordPress; I am testing the waters.