Circulating Zen posts about dealing with a staffing issue on a holiday weekend. She is faced with a student worker scheduled to cover several shifts (allowing other students to travel home for the holiday weekend) who has come down with influenza.

Her solution is one that doesn’t fit the guidelines of her workplace.  It does, however, fit the guidelines of her work ethic : professionalism.

Read her post, and remember the instances where you, and others, have stepped beyond your working hours, your job classification, or some other guideline to solve a problem.  Why is this done?  Someone sees a need, determines a solution that fulfills the need in a way that best serves the principles of libraries and their own work ethic, and follows through.

Simple?   Not really.  It is easy to say “not my job” or “I’m simply following the rules”.  Far more challenging is determining when and how to step beyond what you are supposed to do, and do what is truly called for in the situation.  Especially since the person potentially exposes themself to criticism by doing so.

Circulating Zen sums it up well:  “I shouldn’t pawn it off on anyone else. It’s not professional.”

The Perfect Storm is a brief essay in the current issue of the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) newsletter.  G. Sayeed Choudhury, the author of the essay, states that

“Universities have authentication and authorization systems to identify who you are and what you can use; they also have office software or course management systems to support collaboration.    How many passwords do you use within your university system? How easy is it to collaborate with people outside your university? Yet within and without our universities, many faculty, students, and staff collaborate daily using Google’s suite of tools.  This trend will almost certainly grow once Google Wave is launched later this year.  With its impressive integration of services and novel method for identity management, Google Wave may become a tsunami that washes away the office software suite—and perhaps even the course management system.”

I am not so sure that Google Wave will be the tipping point, but it is certainly another step in this direction.  How many of us have stepped outside of the boundaries of the traditional tools we use for our work and schooling?  It is humbling to recognize how much time and effort can be saved through the proper application of a new software program, or an online service, or even tapping into social networking to gain insight (it is interesting that e-mail lists are considered standard, while Facebook, Twitter and blogging still have the “Library 2.0″ label stuck on them… they are all different forms of social networking, with their accompanying strengths and weaknesses).

Choudhury adds:

Too often we fail to examine trends beyond our own institutional context; we are reluctant to embrace risk taking when developing services or infrastructure.  The choices that universities and libraries make regarding infrastructure in the next few years will have profound implications for the future.

I would take it a step further, and suggest that we not only don’t look beyond our own context, we fail to grasp the possibilities that exist with new technology and new applications of existing technology.  When the environment surrounding our libraries changes, the environment within our libraries changes as well – whether we incorporate these changes or remain passive.

In other words:  We ignore tools such as Google Wave, Open Source, Open Access, Wikis, Blogs, Social Networking, social library catalog tools, and everything else at our own peril.  These tools have changed our libraries, are currently changing our libraries, and will continue to change our libraries as far into the future as we can see.  If we want to remain relevant (in other words:  if we want to survive), we need to pay attention.  Libraries as they have existed in the past will continue to play a role, but that role will be viewed more as an archive than a dynamic library.

We have lost a lot of ground, but we have the ability and the resources to do this, and it starts with each and every one of us.  How can we do our job better?  Smarter?  Faster?  What tools can we use?  How can others help?  The libraries that pay attention to those questions, and strive to answer them effectively, will be the ones to thrive.

I challenge you to, within the next week, find one new tool, idea, or resource that makes you better at your job.  Repeat, ad infinitum – from here it appears that it is Turtles all the way down.

A few items of note to update yesterday’s post:

The Library is Now Closed (a.k.a. Shuttered Library) is a blog created by an Ohio librarian named Mike (didn’t see a last name) which is compiling links to a vast amount of information and resources for libraries and supporters in Ohio. (thanks Jessamyn!)

Save Ohio Libraries is a blog detailing actions that people and libraries can take to, as the title suggests, save Ohio libraries.

A couple of additional links to Pdf articles that I missed yesterday, both from the “Balanced Budget Framework” page.  Note that neither of these have been properly named; save them to your hard drive and add “.pdf” to the end of the file name so that your computer will know how to open them (or you can open your Pdf reader and open the files from the program’s “File” menu):

• Balance Sheet by Line Item (detailed budget information, including the Governor, Senate, and House versions of  budget allocations)
• Highlighted State Strategies (a list of a dozen states, with their approaches towards balancing their respective budgets)

Eric Shonfeld at TechCrunch writes:

“Once again, the Internet is shifting before our eyes. Information is increasingly being distributed and presented in real-time streams instead of dedicated Web pages. The shift is palpable, even if it is only in its early stages.”

Twitter.  RSS.  Facebook.  Digg.  You-Name-It-Feed.  It is becoming apparent that this is the next big shift in internet usage, and, as with the previous shifts, it is hard to guess what the effects will be, and who will be affected.

And this, like previous shifts, will not supplant previous internet use trends.  HTML, or some form of it, will still be very dominant.  Blogs and Wikis will continue to exist, and will be useful tools for certain types of communication and interaction.  Integration will continue to be the norm, with the “now” infusing itself throughout.  How will this change be considered dramatic?

“Traffic occurs in bursts, depending on what people are paying attention to at that second across a variety of services. Someone might notice an obscure blog post on Twitter, where it starts spreading, then it moves to FriendFeed and Facebook and desktop stream readers such as Tweetdeck or Seesmic desktop and before you know it, a hundred thousand people are reading that article. The stream creates a different form of syndication which cannot be licensed and cannot be controlled.”

This “cannot be licensed and cannot be controlled.”  Think about this.  How much of your web presence is based on control:  control of layout, content, contributors, and most of all, control over the rate at which change occurs?   For a library web site, how much of this control is able to be ceded before the concept of a library web site itself changes, without controls?

As with many future technology issues, now is the time to begin thinking, discussing, understanding all of this.  We cannot begin the process of deciding or planning, because none of us can predict how this will play out.  What will we have in place to deal with this, to anticipate this, to harness this?  One benefit of this process will be the inevitable inspiration that some will have about the potential of streams; a future must-have library web site technology might come from this.

Start thinking!

This post will contain just a couple of links, but there is a wealth of information on the other end of each:

• 101 Great Free Sites and Downloads You’ve Probably Never Heard Of has been put together by PC World.  I will bet you have heard of at least a few of these, and I would recommend using this as a starting point in your search for resources and applications (i.e. if you see something helpful, look for other resources that provide the same… PC World sometimes skips great resources for simply new and flashy resources).  found via ResourceShelf
• 30+ Places to Find Creative Commons Media is a post on the SitePoint blog, which is a great resource for web developers.  This list is fairly focused, but many people forget about the treasure trove that is Creative Commons when they look for pictures, sound or other media resources.

Evernote is an online service that serves an interesting purpose:  it allows you to indicate digital items that you wish to remember, it stores them, and then makes the entire collection searchable.

Or more specifically, you can have it remember all your blog posts, tweets, iPhone items (photographs, etc.), typed notes, e-mails… whatever you tell it to store.  Everything gets indexed in their database, and will be there for you to retrieve at whatever time you wish to do so.

Right now this is simply a neat idea, and assuming that it works as smoothly as it’s description, a good way of archiving the wide varieties of communication and digital storage we use in our daily lives.  However, I think it is more than that… I suspect that this is the social leading edge of what is becoming more and more necessary in the digital age: the necessity of having some sort of structure to the hodge-podge of data that accumulates like peanut shells in a sports bar.

Another way of viewing this is that it is similar to the ideas behind the Semantic Web.  This isn’t a perfect match, of course, but the ability to match up commonalities between different chunks of data is the goal in each of these endeavors.  Understand that the amount and variation of the data is not going to be reduced in the years to come… we are going to need tools like this just to keep abreast of the tide of information that we will encounter.

Watch for other companies to address this idea; I will likely wait for something that can reside on my own server space (perhaps syncing indexes with others for greater effect), and preferably open source, rather than trust that this or some other cloud will achieve permanence.

found via the Proverbial Lone Wolf Librarian

TechCrunch is a blog.  A blog about technology startups.  It is run by Michael Arrington, who is someone I consider to be a straight shooter.  When evaluating a new technology, company, or service, he states what he feels about it, and does it in a fair, straightforward manner.  He is not always right in his reviews (who could be?), but he is insightful and correct most of the time, from what I have read.

In today’s post, Some Things Need to Change, he spells out what his life has become over the past few years.  Because he calls things as he sees them, he has had to deal with a great number of indignities, including physical abuse, being spat upon by strangers, and worst of all, death threats upon him and his family last summer from what turned out to be a credible threat.

I have written posts based on items I have seen on TechCrunch at least 18 times over the past couple of years.  If you look them over, you can see the range of ideas and resources that he covers.  That he is needing to take time off and decide whether to continue is understandable; the actions by others that have forced this is not.

Mike, I hope you have a restful break, and that you are able to come to a clear decision that will be best for you, your family, and the world as a whole.

HotStuff 2.0 is described by its creator, Dave Pattern, as “an automatically updated blog… [in which] a daily blog post is generated using a single word that has seen a marked increase in usage over the last few days.”  The best part is that this blog is built upon “nearly a thousand library related blogs” (including this one), and is a great way to explore library blogging.

Added features, all automatically generated, include word wheels, Hot or Not (I am currently #18… we shall see where that goes), and detail pages for each of the blogs, including a list of similar blogs.

Seriously, check this out.  If you don’t find at least one new and interesting blog, I’ll refund your annual subscription to Libology

found via Walt at Random

Typalyzer is a simple, straightforward tool that accepts the web address of a blog, then analyzes the contents to determine which of the 16 Myers-Briggs personality types best describes it.

Libology comes out as INTJ, which seems fairly close to the mark.

found via MetaFilter

Walt Crawford has posted his list of 607 library-related blogs (this one included).  This is as definitive and current a list as one is likely to find, and Walt has done an excellent job compiling and checking the links.

If you cannot get your fill of library blogging from this source, then you are more hard core than I.

found via Walt at Random (also included)

Walt Crawford (“The Library Voice of the Radical Middle”) has created a list of nearly 600 library-related blogs.  It is interesting to scan the list and marvel at how many are unknown to me.  I suspect that I could spend hours simply browsing through them…

Libology is in there, btw (kudos for being current!).

thanks to LISNews