PLN Highlights

What’s new at the PALINET Leadership Network?

More than you might expect, given that the 2008 ALA Annual Conference has taken up much of the week.

• In Leading or managing? two bloggers who are both managers and leaders comment on the differences between leading and managing–and note that there are times when you need a manager, not a leader. Jeff Scott and Doug Johnson offer provocative starting points; your comments are also invited.
• The age of librarians by Wayne Bivens-Tatum provides a discussion of age-related issues related to librarians and leadership that complements Iris Jastram’s earlier On appearances and legitimacy.
• Leader’s Digest June 2008 includes a number of items on innovation–and also a second-hand summary of the OCLC Symposium at ALA Annual 2008, derived from several blog posts about the symposium. As reported, the keynoter (Michael Schrage) used a term for library funding–subsidy–that may deserve further discussion. I’ve started a topic (”Subsidy or common good?”) in the Funding section of the PLN Forum. We’d love to hear your comments on the issue. (Note: As usual, segments of Leader’s Digest June 2008 will also appear elsewhere in PLN over the next few weeks.)

As always, it’s really your PLN, and we’d love to hear what you’d like to see in it. Contributions and suggestions can go to crawford@palinet.org or waltcrawford@gmail.com (I’ll be happy to edit and do wiki markup on emailed contributions)–or you can respond or contribute directly within PLN itself.

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Update, July 3, 2008: If you looked at Leader’s Digest June 2008 on July 2 or early on July 3, 2008 (before 1:30 p.m. EDT), you missed five sections. They’ve been restored now, right in the middle of the page: After “Wikipedia use grew…” and before “OCLC Symposium.”

What’s happening at the PALINET Leadership Network?

As many of us see Anaheim looming in the middle distance, this may be a good time to focus on the Talk pages–where you can add your own comments on a piece if you’re not ready to add them to the piece itself.

Every article has a Talk page–usually the second tab at the top of the article. Even if the article is protected, registered users can add to the Talk page. There are many other ways to participate directly, to be sure, and we’ll continue to harvest liblogs and other sources for indirect participation, but here’s some of what’s already there:

• When I picked up Carl Grant’s challenging “Call for OpenLibrarianship” from his blog,  I added some of my own comments. Carl  responded with an excellent post expanding his original thesis–which I also imported, with permission.
• Every PLN Challenge begins with responses from some panelists and is intended to challenge some of you to add responses. Two people (so far) have responded to this month’s Challenge, including the person who inspired the Challenge. There’s also been a long, thoughtful response to the May 2008 Challenge, “Positioning the library for 2020,“
• Sometimes, the Talk page contains paraphrased comments picked up along with a post-turned-article. Here’s an unusual example well worth reading and maybe adding your own comment to–where the post (”Future catalogs: food for thought“) and comments came from a list rather than a blog.
• Nicole Engard added a useful list of blogs focusing on open source to “Open source notes and resources” to enhance the list already provided as part of the article.
• Steven Bell offered an interesting discussion of what’s special about organizational leaders in response to my own “Who’s a leader?”

Any time the Talk tab is blue rather than red, it means there is (or at some time was) content on the page. (The “Talk about it” link will also be blue rather than red.) Take a look–or add your own.

These examples of discussion and argumentation may only be visible if you have a PLN account, since they’re attached to protected articles–but it only takes a couple of minutes to start a free PLN user account and two quick email validations to gain write access. I’m just noting a couple of examples here; you’ll find others.

• Steven Bell, the Blended Librarian, also added significant commentary to the LLN Peer Panel for May/June 2008, “Leadership issues redux-May 2008” and–in the early days of PLN–added notes on great experiences to the very first PLN Challenge, “What keeps you up at night?“
• You’ll find three diverse comments added to Glen Holt’s “Too cheap to matter,” one of them mine. (As editor, it’s my responsibility not to change the meaning or slant of a contributed essay–but as part of the PLN and library communities, I feel free to add comments on Talk pages.)

You’ll find other new and modified pages since the last PLN Highlights post, to be sure, including new pages on multitasking notes (a page that will have lots more content in the future!) and time management, as well as substantial additional content in articles such as Problematic management, Leadership and succession, Change notes, Brands and Trends to consider.

What’s new at PALINET Leadership Network?

• The June 2008 PLN Challenge offers Advice for interim library directors–and we’d love to hear your advice, especially if you’ve been in such a position.
• Libraries in the new age summarizes Robert Darnton’s thoughtful article in the New York Review of Books and adds notes on JISC’s new Libraries of the Future program.
• You’ll find major additions to Innovation notes and smaller updates and changes to Ebook notes, Kindle and ebook reader notes, and Google Book Search, Open Content Alliance and Live Search Books notes among other updated articles.
• Fans of Jamie LaRue’s cogent views will find them all under a new category, LaRue’s Views–with a link to an archive containing much more of LaRue’s writing.

Getting ready for ALA Annual in Anaheim? If you go to a program concerned with leadership–or one you think library leaders should know about–we’d love to have your report. You can enter it directly in PLN, or you can send it to Walt Crawford (crawford@palinet.org or waltcrawford@gmail.com), marked as a PLN submission, and I’ll do the wiki markup and some light editing along the way.

What’s happening on the PALINET Leadership Network?

• The LLN Peer Panel revisits a topic from 2006 (and, in different wording, the first PLN Challenge): What is the one biggest issue facing libraries today? You’ll find responses from Loriene Roy, Gary Strong, Jamie LaRue, Mike Crandall and George Needham in Leadership issues redux-May 2008.
• Glen Holt finds another source of danger for libraries in Chris Anderson’s “free everything” notion and discusses it in Too cheap to matter. You’ll find two comments already on the talk page; more comments are always welcome.
• It’s fair to say that some high-profile library leaders don’t see doom on the horizon. That’s part of one message in the rich set of items compiled by Leslie Dillon in Leader’s Digest May 2008. Dillon’s second item for May 30, 2008 summarizes Robert Darnton’s essay, “The library in the new age,” and it’s fair to say that Darnton sees a bright future for research libraries even as he recognizes what’s happening in the information landscape. That’s just one of eighteen items (most of which will show up elsewhere in PLN, but not for a while). You’ll also find notes on Lorcan Dempsey’s thoughts on reconfiguring the library systems environment and JISC’s new Libraries of the Future program, along with an array of notes on management, leadership and innovation in various fields.

Based on differences between external and internal logging for PLN (only cumulative, never identifying the reader), it appears that quite a few people are being frustrated because they get to an essay–possibly coming from Walt at Random–and can’t read it. A gentle reminder: You’re encouraged to register as a PLN member–it’s free, it takes about two minutes (and responses to two emails), and the only “marketing” will be roughly one email message a month. You’re certainly welcome to use PLN without registering (or logging in), but you won’t be able to contribute comments, add new articles, take part in the forums–and you won’t be able to read some significant subset of PLN articles, including the LLN Peer Panel and Holt essays mentioned here.

Last week’s challenge hasn’t garnered a lot of responses. As we get closer to ALA, we’d love to have feedback and see some open discussion. The forums are open; so are the talk pages attached to each and every article. There’s an open feedback page for PLN as a whole and for each of the primary topics. Let us know what you think, what you find most valuable and what we could do better!

You’re a library leader–or you think you will be at some point. PALINET Leadership Network is here to help–but it’s also here to be a collaborative resource, a place where leaders and would-be leaders share experiences, problems, questions and answers.

As we run up to ALA Annual (at least for 25,000+ of us in the U.S.), it’s a good time to try participating in PLN.

• Disagree with something you read at PLN? Say so on the Talk page for the article.
• Have a great example that backs up an article at PLN? Add it to the Talk page–or write your own article and link it.
• Find that an article raises questions? Ask them on the Talk page–or start a new topic in the appropriate Forum.

You could respond to one of the PLN Challenges, including these:

• Library roles in 2020 - Will your library still play a major role as a physical source for resources your patrons want in 2020–and, based on that answer, what would you expect the primary roles of your library to be in 2020?
• Positioning the library for 2020 - As a direct followup, what’s the biggest thing you’re doing now to position your library for 2020?
• Open source plans - What current plans or recent experiences do you have related to open source software?
• Changing your mind - What have you changed your mind about? Why?

You could argue with the premises or conclusions in any of the articles–every article has a Talk page.

It’s your resource. Help us make it better.

We’re trying something new at the PALINET Leadership Network (PLN), and we’d like your feedback.

There are a lot of articles in PLN, many of them related to one another. We try to provide links to related articles, but that may not be enough, particularly when you’re trying to explore a fairly broad topic.

We got trouble… is the first of a possible series of overview articles (or metanarratives, if you prefer). It doesn’t provide examples or advice on its own. Instead, it links to other articles through a series of paragraphs that should provide a little context along the way. At the same time, each article referenced in We got trouble... (some 30 at the moment) has a link back to the overview at or near the top of its Related articles section. (For now, it’s at the top. Once there are more overviews, there will naturally be articles included in more than one overview.)

Does this help? Is it a nuisance? Your feedback–on the Talk page for We got trouble or as email to Walt Crawford (crawford@palinet.org) will help us refine the concept, expand it–or drop it.

Along with the overview, we reworked the material in a couple of fairly long composite articles and some shorter ones into four new articles, each with some introductory material and (we hope) a little better logical flow. Part of that process was to remove a composite-article title that seemed needlessly negative: “Toxicity, fear and problem people.”

The four new articles:

• Problematic and star employees
• Problematic management
• Problematic communication and behavior
• Problematic organizations

You can get to all of these (and more than two dozen other articles, including many specifically related to libraries) from We got trouble…

While working on this restructuring, I added a temporary article, Editing for coherence. That article will go away in mid-June 2008, but for now some of you may find it worth considering.

By the way, if you send email or other feedback and don’t get a quick response, there are good reasons. Expect responses beginning June 9, 2008.

What’s up at the PALINET Leadership Network (PLN)?

More than we’ll mention here; a complicated attempt to improve usefulness of some articles is still midstream.

Meanwhile, three new articles since the last post here may be related–and at least two of them should really get feedback and discussion:

• The May 2008 PLN Challenge asks “What’s the biggest thing you’re doing now to position your library for 2020?” Three responses appear here; you’re encouraged to add your own responses (at the end of the current article or on the Talk page–or, if you have a lot to say, by linking to a separate article).
• Jamie LaRue believes that there really will be a need for a lot of new leaders in the next few years. “Your reputation is a recruitment strategy” discusses the demographic shift and what it means for recruiting new talent and retaining your best.
• Glen Holt focuses squarely on the negative, connecting current and future increases in energy costs to some recent library budget problems and asserting that energy costs will make paper so expensive that fiction paperbacks will cost $25 to $50. “Too expensive to ignore” is a controversial essay, enough so that I felt compelled to question some of the assumptions on the talk page. Read the essay; think about it. Add your own reactions–on the talk page, starting some topics in the Forums, or as separate articles.

Otherwise…well, we need your feedback, we encourage you to mention PLN to other current and future library leaders, and now it’s back to restructuring a group of articles. A temporary article discusses that process, for any of you that are sufficiently process-oriented to be interested. (If nothing else, the changes in article links from red to blue–and, at some point, blue to red–show progress on the project. A red link means the article doesn’t exist yet–or was deleted.)

Thanks for using PLN.

What’s new at the PALINET Leadership Network?

• In Looking in the mirror, Peter Bromberg offers a dozen questions you should ask new employees to help gain a clearer picture of your own library–and five questions to ask yourself about where you are and where you’re going. Steven J. Bell asks “are you where you want to be professionally?” and suggests that you define your own signature statement–and Barbara Kelly expands the “signature statement” idea to suggest stepping back and making sure your library has a clear, authentic, understandable and real signature statement of its own.
• Service and policy complements the existing Service attitudes roundup (primarily non-library notes), offering notes from several library writers. Barbara Kelly notes ways she’s been delighted by deviations from policy–that might not be deviations at all, but rather flexible, service-oriented policies. Tyler Rousseau takes on the “teach them to fish” attitude in reference services, suggesting that sometimes “just give them the ichhyo…” might be the best course of action. “Karen K.” offers some lessons in customer service and Walt Crawford offers examples of unusually good customer service and the remarkable effects of being just a little more helpful.
• Jeff Scott adds the perspective of a rural public library director to the discussion in Directors, leaders and work-life balance. You’ll be seeing new additions to other existing articles (especially the sets of notes from non-library sources); this one happened a little faster than most.

Your contributions and feedback help make PLN work. Let us know how we’re doing.

What’s up at PALINET Leadership Network (PLN)?

• Wikis and libraries offers a five-minute introduction to wikis: real-world definitions, key characteristics, dominant software, why library leaders should care about them and a few library-related wikis.
• Transparency and MediaWiki considers the extreme transparency of the wiki software most commonly used for library wikis (including PLN itself)–not as a weakness (it’s generally a strength of MediaWiki) but as something leaders should be aware of.
• Wiki notes includes miscellaneous notes on wikis (except Wikipedia, which has its own article).
• Leadership, balance and choice begins a new composite page of notes (mostly outside librarianship) to complement some discussions elsewhere in PLN.
• Presentations begins with segments of Leader’s Digest April 2008 (also added in the past week) on effective presentations.
• There’s a new What’s hot at PLN? page showing the 25 most frequently read articles from April 7 through May 6, 2008, and you’ll find substantial new material in Searching notes, Technology trends and elsewhere.

PLN is your resource. Tell a friend, blog about PLN (if you’re so inclined)–and let us know how we’re doing:

• Give us feedback, by responding to the polls and adding your own suggestions.
• Comment on articles when you disagree or have something to add–every article has a Talk page and you can add content directly to most articles.
• Start a discussion in the Forums–or pick up on something that’s already there.
• Direct email is always welcome, to crawford@palinet.org or waltcrawford@gmail.com

What’s up at PALINET Leadership Network (PLN)?

• “Directors, leaders and work-life balance” offers diverse perspectives on two key sets of questions:
  • Can you be a library leader and still maintain a reasonable balance between the demands of work and the rest of your life? To put it another way, can you have it all?
  • Can you be a library director or administrator and have it all?
• We’re trying to make sure you can always explore further and that you can find worthwhile articles in a variety of ways. To that end, we’ve eliminated “orphan articles”–which is to say that every article in PLN has a related-article link from at least one other article. The goal is to have all but the briefest items also have outbound links to the most appropriate other articles. You can help: If you see an article relationship that isn’t flagged, add it yourself or send me a note (crawford@palinet.org).

PLN exists to serve your needs as a current or future library leader. Two current polls on the general feedback page will help us determine how to do that better. Should we provide more technology briefings and commentary (such as the Kindle/ebook cluster)–and should we provide more policy briefings and commentary (such as the Open Source cluster). We need your feedback and ideas to improve PLN–and we encourage you to contribute and to tell your colleagues about the PALINET Leadership Network.