Tag! You’re It!

I am cleaning out the “clippings” in my Bloglines account tonight, and came to this post by David Lee King, in which he comments on this one by Michael Hyatt.  Even though published a couple of years ago, it is even more appropos today, in my case.  I am guilty, guilty, guilty – even though I can rationalize some of my behavior.

I’ve been using my part-time duties as e-resources librarian as an excuse to sulk, because I truly believe we need a full-time e-resources person.  However, I’ve come to the conclusion that this attitude is helping neither me nor the library, and so I’m ready to look at ways to make this 8-hour-per-week responsibility more efficient.

CMS wants me to continue; CEN wants me to quit; and I’m caught between can and can’t. I’ve got a couple of ideas about how to make it work better, and will use the remainder of this calendar year to hammer out a plan, simplify my filing system, and set up a way to keep reference staff up-to-date with news and changes. Next year, we’ll be in fighting trim again.

Right now, I’m “it”. But I’ll be tagging others, in short order!

Connectedness

I’m a late-comer to some of the networking gizmos that have been around the blogosphere for the last couple of years.  I still haven’t quite got the hang of Facebook – seems to me most like a “hooray for me” type of site, but maybe I just need to be more forward about starting conversations with my “friends”.

Today I joined Twitter and set it up so I can send tweets via sms messages from my cell.  Heard there was a way to use it for Facebook status updates, but that will have to wait till tomorrow – I’ve depleted my mental energy for today.

Aside from the sheer pleasure of trying new applications, I’ve always got half an eye on how something like Face book or Twitter could help us communicate with our remote users.  I manage our centralized telephone service desk – we answer all the phone calls for library administration and all 27 branches in our system.  We have a TTY, but it gets very little use because most deaf patrons would rather text or use the video relay service.

It would be nice to be able to connect with our remote patrons in other ways than just by conventional telephone and e-mail.  We haven’t really talked much about this, but I can see benefits to providing such service.  Although cell phones are on the list of dying technologies re-posted by Stephen Abrams, rignt now, virtually everyone has one and uses it, and we ought to be creating services for the small screen.  For example; a phone-friendly way to search the catalog, manage “my account”, and to contact library staff via sms. (When was the last time you actually heard your kid talking on the phone? At any rate, my kid had over 1,000 text messages on our last phone bill.)