Be Your Own Intern

So far, the hardest part of reading Gretchen Rubin’s book--part of my embedded librarianship project--has been a small section that spans pages 79-80 in which Rubin describes how she learned to “Enjoy the fun of failure.” This was difficult for a number of reasons, not the least of which was feeling bad that she felt some of her efforts were failures simply because they were not appreciated by someone else. It was also hard to read this part, which appears in the “Work” chapter for March, because it served as a wake-up call for me on one of my ongoing work projects.

I wanted an intern. And, miracle of miracles, the hardest part of the process was not (as I had expected it to be) convincing the powers that be that we (a) needed an intern or (b) could recruit one for no pay. Last fall we were thinking of starting a podcast series and I had written a brief proposal detailing what I thought our equipment, staff, and training needs would be. I did all this with virtually no knowledge of podcast production and only a minimal search to try to find similar proposals. It was aspirational writing, with an imagined magic intern as one of our required resources underlined and in boldface type.

After the holidays and assorted delays, we revisited the proposal and had a lengthy team discussion (sidelined by ample philosophical waxing on the definition of podcast) about whether and why we truly wanted to undertake this project. We did and do, and last month I did due diligence to craft the best podcast internship ad this side of Dyersville, Iowa. If you build it they will come, right?

I was wrong. The response to my ad was not sufficient for us to hire someone. And rather than revisit the outreach and marketing strategies I had used to promote the internship, I reread the ad itself and questioned whether I could be my own intern. The time required to orient my hypothetical helper was already allotted. I wondered aloud if I could perform the tasks I had enumerated so meticulously in the position description. Wondering something aloud, particularly in the presence of one’s supervisor, invites a worthy challenge--or maybe a foolhardy adventure--not to mention a healthy dose of accountability.

Here was a project I would have gladly taken on as a library school student. Yet, as professional staff, I felt I lacked the expertise or capacity to commit to making the project a success without guidance from the outside. I was stuck on the notion that what people really want is not to make a difference per se, but to be effective. How could I be an effective podcast intern with no experience?

I reached out to the various list-servs for advice, as well as the people behind any podcast series that were along the lines of what ours would be. I managed to collect a decent number of tips and suggestions, though many of them contradicted one another. “It’s more work than you think,” some said. “Just try one and then make a better one next time,” others chimed in.

In my zeal to avoid the worst case scenario of producing a less-than-excellent podcast, I overlooked the fact that that is not really a worst case scenario. What would be worse is letting the fear of failure paralyze me into avoiding the project altogether. I reread Rubin’s “have fun failing” passage and was struck by all the tasks she tried and “failed.” She had racked up a huge list of “tries” even though she also listed them as “failures.” I decided that I wanted to create a similar list.

As of today, I am my own intern on the podcast project and am happily filling in the “try” column. Stay tuned.

The Solo Librarian's Relationship Status: It's Complicated

Last Friday when I was presenting at my alma mater, I hit on an accidental and important theme while describing the success of our conference Twitter feed: collaboration. I hadn't intended to be obvious about it, but in reflecting on what made (and continues to make) our use of social media unique and effective, it's that not one of us is tweeting or blogging in an empty room. Instead, we're helping each other through the Internet wilderness. It's a complex chain of trial, error, feedback and trust, and it works.

At its inception, the idea behind this blog was to chronicle my adventures in the white spaces, a seemingly lonely place. Solo librarians need other solos to network with, bounce ideas off, and to generally know that we are not alone out here. The truth is, you are not alone in your organization. If you think you are, it must seem enormously difficult to get anything done.

The only task I truly do alone is cataloging, and too often I avoid it altogether in favor of my more collaborative responsibilities. Activities like SMUG would not see the light of day without teamwork and support among many staff members. And no matter how small your own role is in something like a social media users group or tweeting from your employer's trade show, you should try to get involved at some level in any area that could benefit from your skillset. Building relationships through the non-traditional stuff also makes a huge difference when you're sitting down to do a reference interview with someone.

I am greatly enriched by my colleagues in the DC Chapter of SLA, the Solo and Transportation Divisions, and the Associations caucus. Of equal influence are the subject matter experts who make up my customer base. I could not do my work without them because they're the ones I serve, and I have to anticipate their needs. Doing this effectively requires the sturdy structure of a good relationship. (Even better if you happen to like your colleagues and enjoy their company.) But, as I've said here before, these things take time. Nothing happens until we collaborate.

#Enough! My Twitter Style Guide

My Power of the Hashtag training was such a success that I'm moving ahead with our first Twitter style guide. It's also a way for me to do something constructive with my observations instead of complaining. Here it is, an "organic" document at best, but I'm calling this Version 1, Release 1, with a decently sized smirk on my face.

Most tweets are meant to be read left to right, and as such, they still need to be processed as language (c.f. a tweet that is purely meant to get itself into a bunch of search results). Tweet your best using these simple guidelines:

• Whatever you do, be consistent. I'm only half-joking when I say that in all things Twitter, consistent misuse of a character could easily start a new trend.
• The @ symbol is an operator that activates the mention feature. Avoid using @ when you mean “at” unless you really need to save one character.
• Use no more than one hashtag per clause. And you can generally fit no more than one clause in a tweet without a lot of abbreviations.
• Use no more than one @mention per clause. See above.
• Multiple hashtags and @mentions are acceptable when strung together at the end of a tweet, where they are not in context.
• When mentioning several people in a row, as with the #FollowFriday hashtag, there is no need for commas. The names are already set off as links.
• Avoid state name abbreviations in favor of mixed-case state names, such as #RhodeIsland instead of #RI. (I know that's a lot of characters; more on this issue later. It has generated so much discussion over here that I could do a whole post about it.)
• If using a cryptic hashtag, as for a conference, put it at the end of the tweet--not the beginning--unless it is part of a clause. For example, use, “Jordan got OLD! I’m rockin’ out at #nkotb11.” or “Jordan got OLD! #nkotb11.” but not “#nkotb11 Jordan got OLD!”
• Introduce a link with a colon unless your (English, or whatever language you're tweeting in) syntax indicates that a link follows. For example, "You can download my Twitter Style Guide at www.embeddedlibrarian.blogspot.com." However...
• Text will not become a link on Twitter unless it is preceded by http://
• Avoid abbreviations that are used in your field but may not be known by a wider audience (E.g. "pwd" is used in some circles for "people with disabilities" but makes a tweet hard to read and understand by others.)
• Helpful abbreviations for you and your readers:
  w/: with
  ppl : people
  btw : between
  $ : money or funding
  & : and

(Believe it or not, many people forget they can shorten tweets by employing the handy ampersand. For that matter, most people do not derive nearly enough pleasure from writing or saying "Ampersand.")

Now I realize that these tips are less about "style" than they are boring proscriptions that will make an organization's Twitter feeds as unified and consistent as its print publications. But fret not! Version 2 will feature actual style tips, such as how to get your followers to catch on to new, obscure conventions, the diplomatic way to announce a feed's name change, and how to create and maintain identity and voice in your tweets without sounding unprofessional.

There is still a lot to learn, and the only way to do that on Twitter is to pay close attention and keep tweeting. As for referring to the medium itself, I think that the jury is still out with regard to "tweet" or "Tweet" as a noun, and as a verb, and for "ReTweet" versus "Retweet." What say you?

My Library Roots

I'm still following Gretchen Rubin as part of my embedded librarianship project. I find her more and more useful every day. (In March I plan to do a follow-up post about the "Work" section in her book, which is the March chapter.) She recently encouraged her blog readers to think about what we did for fun when we were 10 years old. As for me, I went to the library.

This post is part of the Library Roots/Routes project, celebrating the myriad paths we've all taken. They are seeking blog posts from librarians like you and me about how we got here and where we're going. It's been a nice opportunity for me to reflect on the role of the local public library during my formative years, even though the library I ended up working in bears little resemblance to that small but valuable institution in Cary, Illinois. (It's weird to me that they have a website--since they had only a couple of rooms when I was young--but they do.)

In grade school I was part of the Book It! program every summer. I would have to carefully write out my reading list on a sheet of construction paper on which I had drawn ruled lines, evenly spaced apart. For each book I finished--my all-time favorite was The Saturdays by Elizabeth Enright--I would get a gold star next to the title. Soon the gold stars would fill up the poster, which I proudly displayed next to my closet. If I read all my summer choices, I was treated to a pizza party at the local Pizza Hut. I'm amazed that this kind of food-incentivized reading program still exists, but I can't say enough about its role in my own reading, not to mention my library-awareness.

In high school I spent my afternoons and weekends in the reference room wrestling with huge, green volumes of the Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature. I would look up references to my favorite bands, and then meticulously fill out call slips and take them downstairs where the periodicals librarian would hand me copies of People or Rolling Stone that I would then pore over for hours, learning what Michael Stipe's college major was, or obsessing over what John Linnell's mother did for a living.

This all seems significant to me now, given that I blog weekly about librarianship and can hardly resist weaving in musical references. But at the time--and the importance of this cannot be underestimated--this was all just an afterthought. I grew up at the library. Books were like air. It did not occur to me to become a librarian.

Like many of us, I had other career ideas during college, and for a number of years afterward. I studied psychology and French, and then joined the Peace Corps as a Teacher of English as a Foreign Language. Even then I didn't see too many obvious connections with librarianship, but I did select as my "secondary" or summer project the daunting (and dirty) task of organizing my school's unused warehouse of books, "cataloging" them (before I had any sense of what that meant), and suggesting possible ways teachers could use them in their respective curricula. I was becoming a librarian.

Wara Middle School, Kankalabe, Guinea, West Africa

After a short but intense career in educational testing, I found that what I really enjoyed in the workplace was wrangling technology and training other people to do so. I was fresh out of graduate school in another discipline and the thought of going back, and taking on more educational debt, seemed crazy. Still, the field I was in was not a good fit for me. Something was missing. I wasn't sure if it was technology or people or both. Enter library school.

In retrospect, the library ethic and orientation were always in me, alive and well, if dormant for many years. For me, it took having a few different jobs to realize what I was and wasn't good at, and which of my interests were simply hobbies or intellectual curiosities, as opposed to the beginnings of a profession.

Go to now. I've found a way to combine my passion for language and literacy, my teaching background, my tech skills, my people skills, my service orientation, attention to detail, steel-trap memory, and most especially my love of reading, all in one satisfying career. Those are my library roots.

SMUG Part 2: Power of the Hashtag

In October I helped with the first gathering of our Social Media Users Group (SMUG). This was an effort to inventory our social media strategies, and to help each program team brainstorm original content in order to reduce duplication. Much of our conversation revolved around the eight feeds that now make up our organizational Twitter presence.

Those disparate bits of conversation--splayed across giant 3M flip-chart paper and taking up residence in my office--have finally been synthesized into a couple of documents. Tomorrow we'll take on the pieces that relate to what I'm calling the Power of the Hashtag.

Hashtags are user-created metadata; what's not to love? The librarians among you will get that joke.

I've seen some bad Tweets in my time, and some of the worst have come from people I encouraged to join me in the Land of @ and #. I feel more than responsible for showing them the way. And not only do I want standards for this metadata, I want us to harness its power for good, and not for confusion/obfuscation/obscenity/randomness/fill-in-the-blank. I've also seen the hashtag used excellently. It continues to evolve.

For our second SMUG gathering we'll have two main points of focus. One is declarative: TWITTER SYNTAX IS TRICKY; USE CAUTION. I have a juicy little "What's wrong with this Tweet?" worksheet for this part. The other is a question to get the discussion rolling, with some pre-supplied flip-chart-able answers: Why use a hashtag?

• TO START A CONVERSATION.

• TO RESPOND to a conversation.

• TO REACH NEW AUDIENCES.

• TO SAY WHAT YOUR TWEET IS ABOUT. (Indexing)

• (To be ironic.)*

*We're going to strongly discourage this type of hashtagging at work.

I hope our guests walk away knowing that you should never # when you can @ unless... (I have a decision flow-chart for this one.) If time permits we will get into cryptic conference hashtags and conventions for state names--both in terms of #NY versus #NewYork, and the relative value of Tweeting about our work in #Nebraska if we run the risk of getting drowned out by #Cornhuskers results.

When people feel comfortable with the basics, we might get into sponsored hashtag results (still investigating this), and link truncation woes when using the Tweet button from within a website. (Beware automation!) And now that we know the shortened form of the "via" convention, we have two extra characters to put to work--a temptation best resisted.

P.S. Blogger's spellcheck doesn't like "metadata" or "hashtag".

Return to Search

My Week of Extreme Slow was a success: I was as careful with each task as I was when I first started this job, except that this time I knew what I was doing. I had made the decision to try this for the sake of competence, and not necessarily as a spiritual "slow down." Nevertheless, I couldn't help but hear a great lyric from Tift Merritt looping in my head: "Most days I want to speed up; seems like I ought to slow down."

I was fortunate to have two veritable research requests during my Week of Extreme Slow. I don't know about you, but my job isn't exactly the way I pictured it would be when I was library school. I remember fondly that we had to make videos of ourselves doing reference interviews with mock search scenarios and then critique our own "performances." In that same class my teacher had us fill up blue books with kilometric Boolean equations. It may have seemed artificial and complex then, but it came in handy during an impromptu reference interview with a coworker.

My colleague was sure she had read "something" about how Detroit has run out of big box stores, with related statistics about urban nutrition. We talked for about twenty minutes, and I found myself drawn to the nearest blank sheet of paper so I could casually map out what we were saying. To my surprise it started looking like the draft stage of one of those reference exams--post-interview stage and pre-Boolean.

Besides capturing anything my coworker could remember about the topic, I tried to find out how long she thought it had been since she read this article or whether she remembered anything about the context. She knew she had seen it online, and fleetingly--possibly linked to a Twitter post. You know how it is when you're going through your own brain trying to figure out when or where you read something? It was like that except we were working together to pin down any clues, and I was jotting it all down. I also made sure to ask her if she needed this particular article or if anything describing the situation in Detroit would do. We agreed that I would try to find the essential information, and she would try to find the exact article, and then we would compare search strategies.

After some careful thought and planning, I found the article in my first minute of searching. The magic search phrase ended up being "food deserts detroit site:.gov." I limited myself to government sites only to get a manageable number of results to start with, but that ended up taking me directly to the article. (And here, by the way, is the not-so-elusive-after-all article.)

In the end it was not hard to locate the information, but my colleague and I front-loaded the work by mapping it out verbally before taking ourselves to the search box. It was a satisfying and collaborative conversation. It reminded me of what we always say about librarianship being the perfect marriage between people and technology.

If it seems insignificant to document one little search conversation, consider this: If you're a student, you need real examples of how what you're learning may be needed on the job. If you're not a student...well you might be a collector of search scenarios, in which case you can let me know in the comments what other paths I could have taken on my most recent search adventure.

Library Day in the Life

First thing first: this is my Week of Extreme Slow, part of my Embedded Librarianship Project. I was going to devote a whole entry to it, but I didn't want to miss out on blogging for the Library Day in the Life project. Then I thought, what better way to celebrate and explain my work than to explain how it looks under the microscope.

I started with a to-do list. I've never had a productive day at work without one. The list is not pretty, but by lunchtime about a third of its items had been crossed out, including the biggest, scariest item that I had been dragging my feet on forever.

One of my responsibilities is to plan, write, edit, format, and quality-assure content for a federal interagency website. The process is just a little bit ridiculous and resembles conversing via tin cans: I note changes to be made and transmit these to a federal officer who then contacts a government contractor to make the changes, who then contacts me... I'd have given up on this by now except that I have to document this dance in my quarterly progress report to our federal funders. While putting the changes together (slowly), I found a number of broken links and some mismatched content to repair--or, rather, suggest through my tin can that it be repaired--later.

The rest of my day was focused on cleaning out my inbox, which, although it is empty when I leave on a good day, has been growing fat with messages as if in preparation for this week's snowstorms. Most of the messages hanging around were events to be added to the calendar, alerts on special keywords that I like to find in documents, and notices that so-and-so is now following us on Twitter.

I tweet at least three times a day via two different feeds (different funding sources, different identities & voices, different rules & regulations). This is a treasure trove of activity and information, especially during a Week of Extreme Slow. I took a look at some of the new followers to each feed, and their followers in turn, followed through on some tweets that @mentioned us, and so on. One thing led to another, as they say.

Part of the inbox clean-up involved checking in on my dozens of Google Alerts. I monitor web traffic on the names (and acronyms, and web addresses) of each of our projects, specialized terminology, board members' names, federal grant codes, and more. I've learned to tell a good result from a phantom PDF-chaser. I've disambiguated terms that overlap between our content area and the work, presumably, of some special librarian in another hemisphere whose "LEP" means Local Enterprise Partnerships (not Limited English Proficiency). I've found, cataloged, put in context, and then promoted, hundreds of tiny wisps of information this way. Today I was making sure that each wisp found multiple, strategically-overlapping homes on our website, internal knowledge base, Twitter feed, as well as to see that any mention of us in the press, be it ever so humble, found its way to the communications staff.

The things that didn't make their way off the list were: drafting my "Power of the Hashtag" training for the next SMUG gathering, and putting the finishing touches on a new resource collection on social media and public participation. These will happen, slowly, tomorrow and Friday as I continue in my quest to slow down routine tasks in order to suckle every last bit of learning, productivity, and reflection out of the items on my list.

PS I did all this while listening to Danielle Ate the Sandwich and Neutral Milk Hotel. Great combination.

Passion, Profession, or Practice?

Last year I helped organize a session at our annual conference called, “Social Media and Public Agencies: Practices, Policies, and Potential Pitfalls.” When my boss introduced the session he said, “There must have been a sale on P's.” That goes for this entry as well.

I posted this title as being “On Deck” (see sidebar) a while ago, so obviously this has been on my mind for a while. Here’s what I know: your approach to doing your library job may be a matter of passion, you may consider it a profession, and it may be a deliberate practice (or even all three). Do what works for you, with your unique combination of skills and experience.

As for me, I used to be of the “Follow your passion” mindset, and I was fortunate to have been encouraged and able to do so. I went to grad school (the first time) to become a linguist, which I’ve written about here in the past. I still love the "Follow your passion" conversation--and it builds nicely on my interest in Daniel Pink’s work--but following my passion did not work out for me professionally.

When I entered library school, I found my profession. No matter what positions we hold at any given time, we are part of a community of librarians, and never is that community as strong and important as when you’re starting a new job or flying solo at an old one. You can reach out to others in the profession for guidance, as well as to enhance or maintain your skills when you're looking for work. We are also bound by a code of ethics. That makes this much more than a job. But is it a passion?

In September I had an exhilarating convergence of heroes when JD Roth posted a video of Mike Rowe (also in sidebar) that I sent him and wove it into a great piece called The War on Work. I highly recommend spending some time reading this, comments included. Although I had sent the video to Dan Pink simultaneously, he didn’t post it on his site but he got mentioned a lot in the comments over at Get Rich Slowly. Many people shared their thoughts and feelings about where school, work and interests had taken them, and what this has to do with satisfaction. It was in processing those comments that I solidified my belief that thriving as an embedded librarian is not a passion, nor does it have to be.

My passion is music, not librarianship. If we devised some metric we could prove this beyond any doubt. I used to just consume music, but now that I’m creating some, I see it as a practice above all else (the passion part just makes my fingers hurt less). And since I’ve taken the Happiness Project approach to my work now, librarianship seems more like a practice, too. Clay Shirky writes in Cognitive Surplus that, “Competence is a moving target.” So don’t get too comfortable. Keep practicing.

My Embedded Librarianship Project

Have you ever been too tired to take your contact lenses out at night, and so you stay up even later to avoid doing it? I have. Allow me to explain what this has to do with embedded librarianship.

At some point last year I became passively aware of a person named Gretchen Rubin who had written a book called The Happiness Project. Without knowing too much about it, I decided it was way too sappy for my tastes and I duly avoided learning more about it. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy being happy. Much of this blog is devoted to my own reflections on how to be happy at work. But I thought (without thinking too hard) that I would probably hate a book called The Happiness Project and that I would gain little by learning about its author.

Around the same time, I was “getting religion” about my debt by reading Get Rich Slowly, a personal finance blog about how people behave with money (as opposed to how money behaves in the stock market, for example). Something about JD Roth’s insistence that money management is a daily personal exercise—not a philosophy, as I used to ignorantly believe—led back to Gretchen Rubin, both literally and figuratively. I discovered a whole online network of bloggers devoted to Goals, Accountability, Money, Stuff and Time that includes Rubin, Roth, Chris Guillebeau, Leo Babauta, Courtney Carver and many others. (And they sometimes use capital letters to indicate how much mental energy we spend on things like "Stuff".) While I was still hesitant to check out Rubin’s book, I started following her blog. And that has made all the difference.

Rubin writes about happiness. And just as JD Roth’s exemplary daily writings on personal finance don’t launch readers into shame, blame, and angst at the very thought, Rubin’s daily tips and practical suggestions are indisputably helpful. Most importantly, she is not sappy. Just watch one video of hers and you will know what I’m talking about. She popularized the notion that making one’s bed every day results in greater happiness. (I dare you to try it for a week.)

I admire Rubin for consistently pointing out that everyone’s happiness project will look different. I am now reading the book, and I realized that I started something of a happiness project three years ago when I started this blog. It was initially a way for me to document my adventures “working in the white spaces of the organizational chart.” But what sustained this project was my realization that I am collecting work habits, productivity resolutions, and other heretofore well-kept secrets about flying solo as a new librarian.

Embedded Librarianship projects based on The Happiness Project will have as much diversity and variability as the librarians undertaking them. Every Wednesday is “Tip Day” on The Happiness Project blog, so I naturally think about each week’s tip on Wednesday nights while I am blogging. That’s what works for me. One week the tip was to try a “boot camp” approach to an activity you’ve been dragging your feet on. I used this to jump start the cataloging I had been avoiding for so long. (Yes! Catalog for an entire day to get yourself rolling.)

Today’s tip is to hold yourself accountable. While Rubin uses a Resolutions Chart to do it, I’m a big fan of to-do lists. (And as for my personal finance journey, I have a small, unavoidable copy of my financial goals in my wallet.)

Gretchen Rubin, like me, sings every morning.

Recently I considered Rubin's suggestion to try a Week of Extreme Nice, and I was already thinking of how to adapt this to the workplace. I decided that I would try a Week of Extreme Slow. Once when I was rehearsing for a play, the director had me practice my monologue at an ultra-slow pace for an entire week to focus on the emotion in each syllable, pause and facial expression. I think of this as an analogy to trying a Week of Extreme Slow at work, which will enable me to document the procedures I use, give more concentration to library tasks that I tend to lazily breeze through, and ask in-depth questions about the complexities of our work that I have never understood. A word of caution, though: You definitely need to pick the right week to do a Week of Extreme Slow without falling behind.

What would your library happiness project look like? There are little picky things in mine that are geared toward ending some bad habits (kind of like Rubin’s resolution to take her contacts out before she gets too tired.) I am also trying to incorporate more pro-active, positive measures, such as having a tech tip on my white board that people will see when they walk into my office. Another concrete step I’ve mentioned here is to start telling your colleagues about SLA annual conference as soon as you register. This way (ideally) they will be more interested in what you’ve learned there once you return. Let me know in the comments what your project would be like. And keep smiling.

Why Blogs Die

“There’s never an egg timer around when you need one.” ~The American President

Last September I wrote about professional blog projects. I suggested that they are often conceived to keep up with proverbial Joneses, and also that they are doomed to failure absent careful planning and consideration. I was not wrong, but I understand the problem better this week. Blogs die for the very same reason they are born: it’s so easy.

In his new book Cognitive Surplus, Clay Shirky begins by laying out a simple, captivating summary of the history of American book publishing—one I’d have been glad to have at my disposal during my History of the Book course. To introduce the larger context of his argument, Shirky frames publishing in economic terms. Pre-Gutenberg, books were prohibitively expensive to reproduce in volume. Post-Gutenberg, the folks who owned the means of production still had such a sizable burden to shoulder that their job became a matter of both selecting and producing written texts for readers (not to mention promoting said works to said audiences). This is, needless to say, no longer the case in the world of new media Shirky shepherds us through in his (excellent) book.

Both the beauty and the curse of a blog project in its infancy is the lack of accountability. The barriers to “entry,” or publishing, do not include the time and expense of a print publisher or even the US Postal Service. These are accountability measures, with their own inherent deadlines, that we set up for ourselves in professional budgets to bind ourselves to the organizational mailings of old. We could be pushed through our own hoops by the beneficial entrapments we set up for ourselves by saying, “Let’s do a newsletter,” and then carrying out the various stages of that process. Blogging requires no such advance planning. Though, as I continue to believe, it would be all the better for it.

Blogging also confuses the lines between production and promotion for staff who think it's just a matter of pixilating a newsletter. Organizations can fall prey to thinking the two are similar simply because a blog is online, and that, “If you build it, they will come.” Organizational blogging may have to be a team effort, and the voice of the author--whether co-created or not--might be separate from the voice of the promoter. (Hint: This is also true of print, but somehow it doesn't cause as much confusion in the print medium.)

As expected, the would-be bloggers I cautioned not to promote themselves before producing a certain amount of content have been dormant for a number of months. But since I am not here to complain, I will offer a solution as opposed to an I Told You So.

Why blogs die is not the same as why blogs fail. I do not even know if a blog can fail, but anything is possible. Blogs are easily born, but even more easily reborn. As once proven here, a blog can be resurrected with very little initial effort, in terms of the technology. A project team need only revisit its original goals, division of labor, timeline, and promotional strategy to live again in the blogosphere. Whether it’s your own blog or someone else’s, think of the new year as a time to reboot. Keep blogging.

Tag, You're It.

Well.

This post was originally going to be called "End of an Era," but not only was that already used for several articles on the topic at hand, The End is not as certain as it seemed last Thursday.

Long story short: A Yahoo! meeting slide that showed Delicious as one product to be axed was leaked last Thursday on Twitter and the rest... Let's just say it went the way of Internet rumors and then morphed into a scrumptiously unorganized (though not disorganized, thanks to Twitter hashtags like #SaveDelicious) grassroots "campaign" to send Yahoo! a message.

By Friday morning the news was a patchwork of conjecture, export instructions, and lists of alternatives from Amplify to Zukmo. There were premature obits, emotional laments, memorable tweets, bold assertions that we should have seen it coming, or that we shouldn't rely on free food, and a pointed question from the Washington Post: If this many people love Delicious this fiercely, why can't Yahoo! figure out how to make some money off it?

Yahoo! has still not released an official statement. The Delicious blog confirmed that something was going on, but very little in the way of actual information was provided last week, and below are 1,000 words from the Delicious blog today:

As for me, Yes, I traveled through brief devastation, acted the town crier, set up news alerts, and roped Gretchen into a Farewell, Delicious happy hour. Then I calmed down and started reading as much as I could in order to filter fact from fiction.

My tagging reflexes have taken a hit this week...my bookmarklets are like another appendage, and let's just say it's in a sling right now. I haven't bookmarked anything since Thursday because I didn't want to add to my collection (lingering hysteria mixed with a bit of conservatism for the future) and I didn't want to commit to a new service. One upside was that my tendency to tag everything remotely interesting as "TimePermitting" was tempered, so I had to refine my criteria quite a bit for what I truly thought I would read later. (For all those articles, I emailed them to myself using my AddThis toolbar...it made me much more selective and much more likely to read the things I had grabbed.)

I enjoyed the absolute Meta of seeing articles about Delicious tagged in Delicious, which was more fun than Facebook groups protesting Facebook or tweets about Twitter. It showed that this is a community of users whether you like it or not. I felt part of something, and not primarily because we were venting in unison, but because we were sharing: tips, thoughts, and memories.

(And by the way, I saw some funky versions of the Delicious logo...I'm not sure if that was stylistic in nature or maybe intellectual property paranoia, but don't forget you can use Photoshop to find the exact color mix of an image.)

INTJ

"Extroversion: The act of turning outward; the condition of being so turned."
~The Universal Dictionary of the English Language (1940)

My mentor Dave Shumaker over at EmbeddedLibrarian.Wordpress posed the following question last week and I can't help but respond: Can introverts succeed as embedded librarians? His answer was a resounding Yes, and mine will be, too.

As is my standard practice, I will start with two disclaimers: (1) I do not claim to have any knowledge of this topic except first-hand knowledge from my own experience; (2) I acknowledge than many people would not consider me introverted. However...

When I read Dave's post last week I stumbled down undergraduate memory lane. In college I did a double major in French and psychology, the latter being somewhat of an afterthought and a major academic challenge for my (then) anti-science brain. The best psych course I took was Tests and Measurement. As things came to pass, I ended up with a job in educational testing before I went to library school--to the delight of my Tests and Measurement professor. In this course we basically ripped apart every reputable test, including the Myers-Briggs (now MBTI), and we learned to think critically about testing in general. I took this a step further and approached every known assessment with skepticism and disdain. Dave's post made me realize that it was high time for me to revisit Myers and Briggs, at least as an exploratory mission to respond to his post. Lo and behold, I am an introvert.

I had started to suspect as much. Dave makes the crucial point that folk definitions of introversion and extroversion are not sufficient; it has more to do with where you find energy and insight. As for me, it's true than when I'm with others I tend to talk a lot (and loudly), but I enjoy spending time alone more than would likely be healthy for a true extrovert. As my neighbors will attest, I prefer to spend my commute reading rather than discussing local politics (although I will be forthright in saying so), and my coworkers will tell you that I have my headphones on whenever I am at my desk, drawing a lot of strength from my own reactions to music.

My "I" score was not as clear-cut as other dimensions, but it would be dangerous to correlate that with a measure of success in embedded librarianship. True, I often speak about "walking around the office asking people what they are working on," which may sound like a behavior tipped toward extroversion, but where do I get the courage to do that sort of thing?

The real "E" in this job has been entrepreneurship. I had very little to build on except my own skills and strengths. There was so little structure that I had to go out and find staff members to collaborate with, and to learn from. But it was in equal part a matter of deep and careful reflection on how to make my way here, what I had the capacity to do, and what would be of service to others. (Service is perhaps another way to view the "outward turning" in the 70-year-old definition of extroversion above.)

It would be interesting to look at correlations between MBTI scores and entrepreneurial activities, as well as "measures of entrepreneurialism" as a characteristic of embedded librarianship.

(Special Edition) My Year in Books: 2010

My book life this year, by the numbers:

I finished 22 books, nine of which were fiction, and 13 non-fiction. Five of these were memoirs, and three were books of short stories. Nine were written by male authors (2 by Kurt Vonnegut), and twelve were written by female authors (4 by Lorrie Moore). One was written by a man and a woman (Your Money or Your Life). I published a review of If We Can Put a Man on the Moon in a trade magazine for transit professionals.

I met one author: Chris Guillebeau. (See photos from the DC stop of his Unconventional Book Tour.) I contacted five authors besides Guillebeau: Marlee Matlin, Lorrie Moore, David Carr, Michael Idov, and Daniel Pink. I heard back from Marlee Matlin, David Carr, and Daniel Pink (and Michael Idov reTweeted me – does that count?).

THE BEST BOOKS I READ IN 2010 are:

(Fiction) The Help by Kathryn Stockett and Ground Up by Michael Idov; and

(Non-Fiction) The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell and Lessons in Becoming Myself by Ellen Burstyn.

Here is the entire list:

(*=highly recommended)

1. I’ll Scream Later by Marlee Matlin

2. Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger

3. The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell*

4. Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? by Lorrie Moore*

5. If We Can Put a Man on the Moon by Bill Eggers and John O’Leary

6. Like Life by Lorrie Moore

7. Emergence by Steven Johnson

8. The Help by Kathryn Stockett*

9. Self-Help by Lorrie Moore

10. Jailbird by Kurt Vonnegut

11. Novel About My Wife by Emily Perkins

12. The Night of the Gun by David Carr*

13. Lessons in Becoming Myself by Ellen Burstyn*

14. Anagrams by Lorrie Moore

15. Ground Up by Michael Idov*

16. Your Money or Your Life by Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez*

17. Cleaving by Julie Powell

18. The Art of Non-Conformity by Chris Guillebeau

19. The Case for Books by Robert Darnton

20. Drive by Daniel Pink

21. A Man without a Country by Kurt Vonnegut

22. Lucky by Alice Sebold*

Some of the books burning a whole on my shelf for 2011 include Your Money: The Missing Manual, There Will Be Rainbows, Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us, Sundown Towns and The Happiness Project. Stay tuned.

Ten Weeks to Prepare and Ten Seconds to Tweet

When I was in library school, wading through Bopp & Smith's tome on reference, I read something about the responsibility of the public librarian to "index the community." It was a passage about how a librarian fulfills a role much like that of a hotel concierge in some communities. This phrase stuck with me, likely because when I was in high school planning my majors in French and communications (one of which came to fruition)--loving learning the ins and outs of Chicago city blocks--I wanted to be a concierge when I grew up.

While I do love showing DC visitors the best pizza place and tea shop in town, I became a librarian, not a concierge, but I'd like to think I still do my best to "index the community," whatever that community may be in my small special library. One of my favorite ways I have succeeded in doing this is to run the Twitter feed for our annual conference. You may think this is a no-brainer, but let me tell you how to do a bang-up job of it as a special librarian and make yourself indispensable in the process.

We had a "gently used" conference feed from the previous year hanging around. About ten weeks prior to the conference I was offered the reins and the password. Unlike some conference Twitter feeds where the username indicates the date/year of the event, this one was general enough that we could reuse it once we rebranded the profile with the new conference locale, logo, conference dates and themes.

I looked up the Visitor & Convention Bureau, Chamber of Commerce, and local media outlets in our destination city, followed their feeds, and looked to see who they were following. I also found a number of feeds from restaurants near the convention center, and from big attractions like the aquarium and museums that conference attendees might want to visit during free slots. I tweeted for a while as the conference before doing much promotion of the feed, which I highly recommend.

When I had a rich feed going, I worked with other staff to have a link to the conference Twitter page in all the marketing pieces we were using leading up to the big event. This included our website, Facebook page, and correspondence with people who had already registered. When people completed their registration in Cvent, a link to the Twitter feed would appear with the phrase "Get conference updates on Twitter!"

For a few weeks I would tweet three times a day, mixing the announcements to have a good combination of logistical information for people who had already registered, and tweeting the allure of our conference subject matter with strategic hashtags. I looked up the speakers slotted for various sessions, and the sponsors for conference events, and found their Twitter feeds. At this point I was getting great use of the mention feature, which led to a lot of followers. (Much of what goes on in Twitter operates on the vanity principle, and there is no shame in that.)

When we were a couple weeks out I worked with the webmaster to get a demo of the Twitter feed on our home page so we would know how it would look. It took a little bit of code to upgrade the standard widget so it would include both manual and automatic retweets, and we were glad we had started early. Three days before the conference started we went live with the new page, and then I had to really keep up the tweets (which by this point were about weather, schedule changes, and last ditch efforts to get more registrants).

Then the fun really began. I was running around the convention center for a week posting fliers about the feed in strategic places, handing out stickers for people to display their usernames on the official conference badge, and switching between two Blackberrys as I ran the official feed and a separate feed for one of the pre-conference meetings. Conference organizers were great about announcing me if I was live-tweeting a session so attendees could jump on board, mention us, and have us mention them. I was also taking a lot of pictures and tweeting those.

While I was in sessions it occurred to me that my broad knowledge of the organization, a good lock on who's who in the field, my ability to think fast and know a good soundbite when I hear one, and the discretion required when anything mildly political spills into the soundbites--those library skills enhanced each and every tweet. And hey, the local Greek restaurant started following us and then offered free appetizers to any attendee with a badge from our conference!

After the conference I was asked to give a presentation on how all this came together and I talked about the 700+ messages we had generated as a way of codifying our institutional knowledge, our impact on the field, and our outreach to new stakeholders by putting ourselves and our issues into the Twitterverse.

Librarians with "Issues"

I found that by looking at the white spaces on the organization chart--the gaps between jobs, where no else had responsibility--that there were new job opportunities, like building an intranet, starting a corporate university, creating a daily business intelligence report, that needed to be done. As it turned out, sometimes I was promoted into a job and sometimes I was promoted because I created the job that needed doing. ~Susan Fifer Canby

Two posts over at Gypsy Librarian have gotten me thinking about librarians, neutrality, and advancing issues beyond information organization and literacy. The specific issues Angel addresses (LGBT suicide, for example) are ones that arise in his context, not mine, but the topic is a good one for embedded librarians. The closest I have come in this forum to advancing any "issues" was when I wrote that modeling good reading habits should not be outside the domain of the special librarian, even in a corporate setting. Let's start there.

Information literacy in our specialty is certainly within our scope. This is without question, and general information literacy or search strategy is a natural offshoot of that topic. These are all "safe" issues for us to get behind. Taking on web accessibility can be a bit risky, and very difficult, but it falls very naturally within a librarian's scope of responsibility and influence. What about other issues? The farther into the white spaces we move, the more complicated it becomes, and the more opportunities there are for advancing important issues.

I found myself being the cheerleader for Census 2010 in our office--both in terms of encouraging our stakeholders to be counted and in terms of what the results will mean for our work--and I did a lot of good by sticking with it. I recently took on a voluntary research project about Limited English Proficiency (LEP) and what it has to do with transit agencies' outreach, and this has been productive and praised as well. There are also the innocuous issues that I take on, like partnerships between libraries and transit agencies, that may or may not bear fruit and probably won't offend anyone along the way.

Whatever the topic may be, we are sure to do more good, create better job security, and get greater satisfaction from our work, by following the issues rather than hiding from them.