LLN Highlights

What’s new at the Library Leadership Network (LLN)?

New and Improved Articles

• Multitasking Notes includes new notes on decreases in “media multitasking”–and reports on a small study that seems to show that heavy multitaskers are worse at multitasking than those who don’t do it all the time..
• Multitasking and Librarians includes new notes on finding a middle ground–but also on the need for focus. Some older material hss been trimmed.
• On Age, Technology and Culture raises some real questions about the willingness of (many, not all) older librarians to adapt to changing online culture–and adds a great commentary on building an online personal and professional presence.
• Engaging the Community now includes some fine examples (from one Wisconsin library) of words from the community, the kind of patron feedback you can use to strengthen your staff, your support, your community.
• Commentaries on mentoring within the library field, including a major new commentary on “libpunk mentoring,” are now in the new Library Mentoring Experiences. Some of these commentaries came from Mentoring Notes, now devoted to notes from outside librarianship.

Other New Resources

Once you’ve logged in, you’ll also have access to:

• Leader’s Digest, including new items on managerial visibility, behavioral economics, dealing with multiple news sources and why it may make sense to replace a failed leader with an outsider.
• There’s a new blog in town: Executive Decisions by Arnold Hirshon, LYRASIS’ Chief Strategist and Executive Consultant–part of the new LYRASIS Executive Advisor Program (LEAP).

What’s up at the new Library Leadership Network (LLN)?

• Read & Learn: Completing the Transition discusses and celebrates the completion of the move and consolidation of 359 articles in the old LLN to 188 new and improved articles in the new LLN.
• We’ve restored the “What’s Hot?” list, currently showing the 27 most widely read articles for February 2010 (scroll down from “New in Read & Learn”). Why 27? Because three articles tied for 25th most widely read.
• When you go to Leader’s Digest, you’ll find new notes on “futures thinking,” the availability of 65,000 free ebooks from the 19th century (courtesy of the British Library), and the assertion that “real leaders don’t do focus groups.”

What’s new at the Library Leadership Network (LLN)?

Read & Learn

• Telling the Library Story combines several related commentaries on the topic
• Does Success Justify Funding? includes two newspaper columns on the eve of a library election–and a post-election column following a loss.
• Library Rankings and Reality includes commentaries on how libraries (and cities) may be ranked and how one top-ranked library is managed.
• Leadership, Balance and Choice includes a new commentary on thinking about stress management.
• Attracting New Users and Usage offers three commentaries on attracting and keeping patrons.
• A somewhat light-hearted commentary added to Reading Matters.
• Staff Feedback and Involvement includes an additional upbreat commentary.
• All articles from the old LLN have now been moved to the new LLN.

That last one may be most important. The old LLN will stick around (for a while) as a series of links to articles in the new LLN, but there is (or should be) no actual content on the site. Later, there will be an editorial at the new LLN about the move and its consequences.

Leader’s Digest

Once you log in, you’ll find news items and commentary on getting ready to be a changemaker, whether people will pay for online content, customer-focused business–and a reminder that two-fifths of American homes do not have broadband.

What’s new at the Library Leadership Network (LLN)?

New and Improved Articles in Read & Learn

• Coping With Change in Libraries now includes an LLN Peer Panel on change management.
• All Planning articles have moved to the new Library Leadership Network.
• Through Patrons’ Eyes now incorporates a discussion on patron-centric library practice.
• All Services articles have moved to the new Library Leadership Network.
• Mentoring Notes now incorporates an LLN Peer Panel on mentoring.
• Performance Evaluation and Improvement combines commentaries on this topic.
• Hiring the Right People offers a range of comments on this key topic.
• Another commentary added to Librarians and Management.
• Influential Books on Librarianship and Leadership
• All articles on books and resources are now on the new Library Leadership Network.

Leader’s Digest

New items include notes on a new report on social networks, an encouraging item on brain functions that improve with age–and a discussion of futures for online experiences.

What’s new and improved on the Library Leadership Network (LLN)?

Articles in Read & Learn

We’re this close to completing the long process of moving material from the old, wiki-based LLN to the new, Drupal-based LLN–a process that’s taken a while because we’ve been improving, updating and combining articles as we go. As of now, fewer than 50 of the roughly 330 articles that were on the old LLN are left to go. We should reach completion within two weeks, after which there will be a steadier stream of brand-new and newly-improved articles.

Last week saw many combined and improved articles on the new LLN, including the following:

• Libraries and Innovation combines several commentaries.
• Innovation Lessons brings together several library commentaries and relevant notes from the management literature.
• All Innovation articles are now iin the new LLN.
• Strategic Planning: An Introduction brings together a series of introductory essays into a single, albeit still incomplete, whole.
• Strategic Planning Commentaries offers a variety of insights on key aspects of library strategic planning.
• Disaster Planning combines commentaries on coping with natural disasters.
• Telling Your Community’s Stories offers two perspectives on libraries as micropublishers.
• Traditional Services: Still Important? provides a range of commentaries on the remaining significance of traditional services and physical libraries.
• Open Access Resources has been updated to reflect changes in the Open Access News and the emergence of a new crowdsourced project to track open access information.
• What Every Leader Should Know about Information Management is now a much shorter set of excerpts from the original manuscript.

Leader’s Digest

Log in to your LLN account (or create one if you don’t already have one on the new LLN) to read a variety of updates from the management literature and elsewhere, including these from last week:

• Design thinking: What is its value? – Notes on a special report from Bloomberg/Business Week
• Balancing team workload – Coping with tensions when employees work on multiple teams that may be competing for time and resources.
• Wikipedia’s book sources – A quick note about a “book sources” page in Wikipedia–used for all book references that are built properly and include ISBNs–that can result in searches to one of several sources (in a two-step process).
• “Innovator’s DNA”–Five discovery skills claimed to be essential to innovators.

What’s new at the Library Leadership Network (LLN)?

Primarily technology trends (noting that, in many cases, “Trends” means “What looks to be important this year,” not necessarily “Fads and shiny new things”).

• Technology Trends: Recent History now includes trends through mid-2009. Trends affecting libraries, through 2008, appear in summary form grouped by category–e.g., trends in library systems and methods, trends in resources, publishing and services. Library-related trends for 2009 still appear as individual essays from half a dozen people–followed by seven brief lists of other trends and predictions, and a few commentaries on individual trends.
• Technology Trends is entirely new (except for Roy Tennant’s “Ten things you should know about technology”), covering library-related and other technology trends asserted since June 2009. We include summary coverage of LITA Top Tech Trends at ALA Midwinter 2010 (along with eight links to longer coverage)–but you’ll also find ten (remarkably sensible) predictions for the e-reader/ebook market, a few notes on 2009 and 2010 from a medical librarian, notes on the 2010 Horizon Report and, going beyond libraries, media and education, half a dozen sets of technology trends from other sources.
• Entrepreneurialism now incorporates notes from outside the library field relevant to librarians as entrepreneurs.

When you sign in, you’ll have access to Leader’s Digest, including recent posts on the iPad, book-finding iPhone apps and transforming your organization.

What’s new at the Library Leadership Network (LLN)?

Right off the bat, there’s a new URL–http://libraryleadership.net. (Never fear: http://lln.lyrasis.org still works!)

There’s also a login, although you’ll still be able to read the essays whether you’re logged in or not.

Refreshing

While the login process was being created and tested on one copy of LLN, we were continuing to refresh and sometimes merge material from the old (MediaWiki-based) LLN to the current (Drupal-based) LLN.

For some of you who may have been browsing LLN over the last few days (or linking to articles from elsewhere), the last stage of that transition process may have yielded some surprises.

All the changes made during the testing period should now be reflected in the current LLN. In the process, five articles have new URLs:

• Holt on Libraries and Technology combines three of Dr. Glen Holt’s essays from 2006 and 2008.
• Ebooks and Readers–Recent History provides earlier notes on ebooks and dedicated readers, notes that may still be worthwhile as recent historical material.
• Holt on Other Library Issues combines several essays that originally appeared as Holt’s Perspectives between 2005 and 2007.
• Why Bandwidth is Important offers Jeff Scott’s perspective on an ongoing issue that may be critical for public (and other) libraries.
• Chalk Notes: A Library Success Story offers an inspirational story of spontaneity and serendipity from the director of a a SUNY library.

If you happen to follow a link within LLN that doesn’t take you where you expected, please let me know–when you’re dealing with more than 300 essays, most of which have at least four or five links, there’s bound to be a slip or two.

Expanding

You should still be able to read all the Read & Learn essays in LLN without creating an account or logging in–but we hope you’ll do both (and you shouldn’t need to log in each time you visit, if you’re using a private computer).

Why?

• It’s helpful to LYRASIS to know who’s using LLN.
• We’re expanding LLN beyond the essays into a growing array of new services for library leaders–and those services will require you to login.

One of those expanded services isn’t entirely new: Leader’s Digest, Leslie Dillon’s ongoing series of brief posts on the management literature (and beyond). When you log in, you can see new items on use of business jargon, increasing your community influence (a report on this year’s OCLC Midwinter Symposium) and a new book on technology training in libraries.

You’ll also find a series of Tech Notes by Tom Zillner of WiLS and can expect to see a broad range of new features in the future.

Joining

The process for joining LLN is quick and easy. Before or after you join, you might want to visit the FAQ page on membership.

Three key excerpts from that page:

• Who can join? Anyone searching for quality information on leadership in the library community can join LLN. Additionally, anyone can follow our updates on Twitter and become a fan of LLN on Facebook for up to the minute updates and additions to the site.
• What’s the benefit of joining? In addition to the rich editorial content available to non-members, registered members of LLN enjoy access to a strong community environment that includes premium content including the Leader’s Digest blog, valuable leadership resources, Tech Notes by Tom Zillner and a user forum with lively, thought-provoking discussions. As the site progresses, we will be adding new and exciting features behind the login to keep users excited about leadership in the library community.
• What’s it cost? We are happy to be able to offer access to premium LLN content free of charge.

What’s new and improved on the Library Leadership Network (LLN)?

We continue to reorganize and improve material from the old LLN to be even more useful on the new LLN, adding new sources along the way. We’ve completed all the articles on Policy and all of those on Technology–and we’re aiming to finish up Leadership before ALA Midwinter.

New and improved articles

You’ll find significant, frequently substantial, changes in these articles:

• Library Leadership Commentaries brings together a range of commentaries on being a library director or leader.
• Conferences and Presentations–Why Leaders Should Care now includes a set of tips for coping with conferences.
• Smaller and Most Valuable Conferences combines commentaries on smaller library and non-library conferences of special interest.
• Different Ways of Dealing with Obstacles now incorporates some thoughts from Leader’s Digest on dealing with change.
• Why Bandwidth is Important offers Jeff Scott’s comments on the need for more internet bandwidth in public libraries.
• Leadership Development Notes and Essays combines notes from outside and within the library field, including a discussion of ALA’s Emerging Leaders program.
• Leadership Succession and Education combines notes on educating new library leaders and thinking about succession.
• Library Issues: A Leadership Miscellany reminds us of issues (from 2006, 2007 and 2008) that are still important to library leaders.
• Library Leadership Challenges and Resources notes some challenges and offers reading suggestions and other fields to pay attention to.

That’s not all by any means–smaller changes show up in at least two dozen articles over the last week alone.

Leader’s Digest

Recent posts include notes from Paula Hane on 2010’s hottest trends (there will be a wholly new Technology Trends article in the LLN Read & Learn section, shortly after Midwinter), a Forrester VP’s ideas on what a book (or CD or DVD) is “really worth,” a note on the recent report on how much “information” we all taken in every day–one of your rare chances to see “zettabyte” in use,  some factoids on ereaders, and another assertion as to what really motivates workers.

Secondary Notes

• There won’t be a post next Monday, when many of you (and us) are in Boston. Look for a post on January 25.
• The “what’s hot” list for December 9-January 8 isn’t going to appear for a variety of transition-related reasons. We’ll leave the November 9-December 8 list in place.
• New in Read & Learn is a continuously-updated list of new articles and articles with major changes. While the list of “What’s New” on the old LLN was always limited to eight articles, we’re letting the new list grow a bit during the transition period–there are so many major changes each week that we don’t want items to disappear too rapidly.

See you in two weeks–or in some cases, see you in Boston!

What’s new at the Library Leadership Network (LLN)?

We’re well past the halfway point in updating and improving articles moved from the old LLN–including the following substantial changes and more from the past two short weeks:

• Technology and Community brings together commentaries on library use of web technologies to interact with their communities.
• Google Book Search and Open Content Alliance Notes includes updated notes on collection sizes and eliminates some outdated notes.
• Libraries and the Read/Write Web–Symposia brings together four symposia on libraries, social networking and “Web 2.0″
• Reading Matters now includes other commentaries on reading and libraries.
• Wikipedia Notes is massively revised and updated.
• Technology Trends: Recent History now summarizes library (and some other) tech trends prior to 2009.
• Recruiting, Hiring and Retaining combines several library and non-library commentaries on finding and retaining staff.
• All articles on Technology are now part of the new Library Leadership Network.

What’s new at the new Library Leadership Network (LLN)?

New and improved articles

We’re still busily moving and improving articles from the old LLN–and doing a lot more improving as we go, sometimes resulting in brand-new articles.

• Libraries, Government and Policy combines a range of commentaries on this intersection of interests.
• Generations, the Public Sector and Policy combines several commentaries on generational issues that relate to policy and the public sector, including libraries and academia.
• Open Source Commentary brings together several commentaries on open source in libraries.
• Wiki Notes includes updates on wikis–and former wikis–mentioned within the notes. It’s fair to say that early crowdsourced books haven’t been big winners, and in one case “all contributors listed as authors” somehow turned into two of 4,000 being named.
• Transparency and MediaWiki has been updated to reflect changes in LLN and in the world of high-profile MediaWiki-based wikis.

With more than 130 articles checked and moved, there’s plenty to read in the new LLN–and the old one will stick around (increasingly filled with one-sentence “articles” linking to the new LLN) as long as it’s needed.

No post next Monday

Don’t expect an LLN Highlights post on Monday, December 28–but that doesn’t mean we won’t be improving LLN.

Posts will return on Monday, January 4.