Change

Library community members recognize Joan Frye Williams as a deep and fluent source of observations and analyses of where and how library services are going, from nascent development through their stages of emerging best practices.

One of the most popular place in the #clanoise exhibits was the California Library Association's own makerspace area, which came fully loaded with soldering stations and three-dimensional printers for conference attendees to explore through use. Libraries and makerspaces have been a trending topic at both library conferences and in local and regional initiatives.

Every week, I have the opportunity--often the opportunities--to provide on-the-spot reference services at a local coffee shop. Among other morning caffeine inhalers on hand as I make use of my own most portable electronics, some shyly ask about the rudiments of choosing and/or using specific creation-enabled tools (iPad, smartphone) . Others ask for help altering the settings on their ereaders. Another kind of query relies on my ability to connect them to online resources when they've been stumped by their own efforts to find the very specific information they'd like to uncover.

Once upon a time, when public library collections revolved around the paper of books and magazines and the vinyl of locking CD and video cases, the midwinter high school break was nigh and all of the teen workers employed at my public library wanted to schedule extra hours of work. One of the reasons we had created and maintained this worker classification was to give adult staff more awareness of how teens saw the library as a working environment, and another, of course, was to expose the teens to the library as a working environment.

Yesterday Forbes published the first of a proposed two-part examination of the Big-6 book publisher/library contretemps around digital book files as collection offerings.

Thanks to the California State Library's Rush Brandis, many of us received this presentation in email form today. The story told by these new figures, and suggested applications for creating a responsive information future, include an array encompassing health, education and much more besides commerce and entertainment.

Yesterday marked the opening of a new session of Infopeople's CORE Reference Fundamentals online course, which I've been teaching twice a year since Carole Leita retired in 2006. One of the six modules in which participants learn, practice and refine their basic reference skills focuses, of course, on resource evaluation.

Keeping your community on the move and engaged can't happen if you stick to the planning stages of whatever strategic changes you know are necessary to keep development a reality. Yes, careful planning is important; but there comes a point when "careful" gives way to a kind of scrupulosity that means "stalling." You and/or the library staff may simply be stalled out by fear, rather than by a need for more helpful information or insights.

Dan Pink is coming out with a new book on December 31, 2012.  It’s called, To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others.  To "sell”, for him, includes much of what we do all day which is convince, persuade and motivate people to do what we want or need them to do.