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It is a very interesting time. As I gear up for another ALA conference, in the very rare spare moments I encounter I’ve been reflecting a bit on my life, my career, and inevitably… this blog.

I’ve seen the signs– blogging is dead. Well, no it’s not. But I’m certainly not the only one I know who’s taken a hiatus. I know the arguments– Friendfeed and/or Twitter have killed blogs. However, in my case that’s really not it. I remain semi-active on Twitter, but I’ve rarely spent any time at all on Friendfeed.

I have a lot going on right now. The transition from Library School student to full-fledged MLS’d librarian happened in mid-April, when I gave my final capstone presentation. I thought, “Ah-ha! Now I will blog again.”

But I did not. I spent evenings with my daughter. We went for bike rides, we read aloud together, we went to the park, and we spent many, many hours on the swing in the front yard.

And I don’t regret a minute of it.

However, by late May I began to feel antsy again and I started putting together presentations, trainings, reading a few blogs here and there, etc. But I just haven’t had the extra time to blog. As you can see from my last “post”, I had intended on live-blogging the Rocky Mountain Innovative Users Group summer workshop—but I ended up needing to come back up to Boulder after our patron network crashed for most of the day.

Which leads me to why I’m really not blogging. It turns out that moving from a position where you have little power (and therefore little responsibility) to one of great responsibility is a huge shift in many different ways.

Before, I could spend the evening on a whim staying up late coding a cool website or mashup just because I thought it would be fun. I could head off to pretty much any meeting, conference, or committee that I could drive to and afford. I could spend my time exploring and playing with ideas and writing rants about what needs to change.

But now I actually have to *do it*.

There’s no one to blame anymore if things don’t turn out well. There’s no “administration” that won’t let me implement something cool for our department. There’s no lack of ability to control the purse-strings or to delegate the tasks. Now I have to figure out how to be the one to get buy-in. I have to figure out how to take ideas from conception to reality not just in my own little office sphere—but across an entire organization.

I have to manage people. Granted—I managed work-study students at the University Libraries, and I managed all kinds of folks in the past in restaurants, sales jobs, etc. But it’s very different managing people who are mostly older than you, who are highly skilled, and who just plain have a whole lot more experience than you. Let me say this—I am ever more grateful *every day* that I had a management class in library school and that the Colorado Association of Libraries Leadership Institute has been so fantastic. It has really taught me a lot and helped me through some pretty intense challenges.

I also have spent a lot of time adjusting to my new role as professional. It’s no longer my job to do all of the nuts and bolts of coding up some new web tool or bringing online a new gadget. That’s something I have to remember. Now it’s time to trust and, when necessary, coach my staff and let them go do it. I need to keep my head in the clouds for strategic visioning and future casting. I need to participate, contribute to, and help shape policy development. I need to empower others.

I have to remind myself of this every once in a while. I almost spent this last weekend at DrupalCamp Colorado because it was “cool”. But I would have come home and played with Drupal all night, and not paid attention to caring for myself, my house, my pets, or getting ready for ALA—not to mention handling my management responsibilities for the week. I had to step back and remember, “things are different now”.

And that’s just fine. It’s tough to be stretched in many directions. However, I prefer to think that’s just a process of expanding myself. Expanding who I am and what I’m capable of. I only hope I remain malleable like silly putty—and don’t crack like old rubber band.

See you in Chicago!

Innovative Services & Practices
4:00 PM – 5:00 PM
John Blyberg, Head of Technology and Digital Initiatives, Darien Library
Gretchen Hams, Head, Children’s Services, Darien Library
Sarah Ludwig, Head, Teen Services, Darien Library
Kate Sheehan, Head of Knowledge and Learning Services, Darien Library

The way libraries prepare for the future is not sustainable, cultural reaction pushed back against expectations of the users

took everything apart and reexamined their services, both from patron and staff side

meet together and allow innovation to drive change

could be any area– not just technical

best thing about culture of innovation– it’s okay to fail

futurecasting and planning for it, makes leaps– it’s okay, say “we were wrong, we’ll fix it”

ADAPT

adaptation synonymous with being an agile organization

small library so can change quickly

staff has bought into– user expect it, don’t see it as drastic but responding to their needs

experiment, trying new things and share their failures help create excellence

cycle of innovation-fail-adapt effect sustainable change over long term, build in culture of change (all staff, users, new hires expect it)

UX focuses on the user (staff, user to the door, and users of web site)

analyzes interface points and suggests changes, with eye toward aesthetics, community, usability

helps make ure this is pushed out to other departments

Gretchen:
too often children’s dept is treated like an island, not at table for innovation

children’s doesn’t serve kids– it serves kids and their parents….

they see the library as the third place – stay for hours, storytime in morning, stay till lunch

but children’s section not arranged for browsing (arranged picture books in sections rather than alphabetically)

who is it for? what is it about?

had to handle every book and make a decision about it, color coding works…

serves both BROWSERS and SEARCHERS

calling the collection “FIRST FIVE YEARS” coded the spine label as FF instead of call number

circulation is way up!

in order for children to grow, they need to feel validated and “published”

creation station so that kids can create and share something (camera, recorder, flipcam, laptop) NOT CATALOGED, NOT BARCODED we trust them because it’s theirs

Sarah:
1. Teen hang out room — no homework, no service desk, it’s their space and we don’t want to invade it (relax and have fun)
2. then “power library” has 25 computers and service desk
3. then classroom for tech training
4. then several study rooms
5. then a small office home office (all the stuff you’d find at Kinkos)

2 positions that are supposed to investigate tech, post about tech, etc.

Teens are the beta users, they are fearless and will tell us what they think….

iMacs with really big screens so four kids and fit around and then they can easily collaborate

all furniture is designed to be easily movable and make the space their own

all walls are glass and they are allowed to right the on the walls (wrote all over how much they loved the libraries)

they ended up using markers on the walls for their homework

HAVE to have gaming in your library if you’re serving teens, don’t program around gaming– just plop it down for them after school and allow them to play as much as they want… WE TRUST THEM

Have Teen Advisory Board manage the Facebook page and they post the events

On Facebook, make a professional profile and friend ONLY the teens, not your colleagues

Kate:
No reference desk, all roaming– meet people at point of need (without being invasive)

not get rid of Dewey, keep some though

start up intensive one-on-one deep reference, also be the point person to work with local knowledge experts

Created subject browsing, gathered different ranges of Dewey into “glades”

Tools to make it work: tiny laptops, EEE PCs, wireless phones, and a slimmed down Reference point (a little curvy table)

Takes Reference out of tech support, guest pass giving out, and allow us to focus on Reference…..

Most important tool: Nametags

Doing IM reference through Meebo, Meebo is tough on tiny screens (moving to Libraryh3lp)

reorganizing collection was a great bonding experience

having a reorganizing collection gives opportunity to constantly review– why is this hear? a new intimacy with the collection…. do we really need this? now we are thinking about, touching the collection all the time instead of it just sitting there

staff at Darien willing to change– they say, “we try a lot of things and sometimes they don’t work… that’s okay”

Libraries are like open source, the more we give away, the better we get

we’re giving more than just information, we’re giving of ourselves more

no more sitting at the reference desk, sitting “apart”

what is most fundamental is to maintain a genuineness and our chief export is kindness