Guardienne of the Tomes

Lots of writing projects, and my wee brain is a bit friend with them all, and trying to keep myself straight. First: I am attempting to draft a short paper for the Internet Librarian proceedings. I can't help it, Rudy practically dared me when she said it was a timesuck and that very few people included them. I have about half of the eight pages done (doesn't sound like a lot, but some of the research I need has been tough to find). I'm hoping to shoot a draft over to Rudy by the end of next week on that one, since it's due August 22nd. I doubt we'll worry about putting our slides in there, since they'll be made available online later, and the slides are likely to change since the presentation's not until October anyway. one of Rudy's concerns was that a paper written now may not reflect exactly what's going on come October...I absolutely agree with her, and would find it shady if anything someone wrote up on technology in August *was* the same after...

I spent this weekend at home completely sans -internet. My Dell desktop (circa 2000) is in its final death throes, and I inadvertently left my work laptop at work on Friday afternoon. I returned to my apartment - which was covered in the books I had shipped myself from ALA, books and paperwork related to my MFA stuff, and the kitchen table....um, let's just say the kitchen table is where I toss all my crap when I walk through the door. I've been needing to tidy up for weeks, but it's tough to concentrate on something like that when my IM is always bleeping, and my Gmail needs checking. So, I restrained myself. I hit the gym and the grocery on Saturday and did not go to the office to get my computer. Some of you will understand the restraint I exhibited there. Instead, I went home, showered, played with the dogster, tidied, read Envy the Night (yes, that's right, I have an Advance Reader's Copy. Thank you, ALA vendors), and saw The Dark Knight (which was fabulous)...

I was just informed by a good friend of mine who loves her literature that when you type "David Copperfield" into Google, the first few results are the magician, and not the novel. We are pretty certain this means that the end of civilization as we know it is imminent. How utterly depressing.

Something happened today that has me thinking about customer service. It's rarely a topic I address, since (and I realize this sounds a bit harsh) you either provide excellent customer service, or you don't. If you don't, there's something wrong with your organization, and you need to deal with it. 'Nuff said. Now, I say this as someone who has managed people in various capacities (Dunkin Donuts and Coldstone as well as libraries), and to be quite honest, excellent customer service really looks the same everywhere, whether you're at a reference desk or schlepping deep-fried dough and coffee across a counter. It's a smile, a genuine interest in helping your customer/patron/whomever, and a collegial atmosphere that prevents an occasionally tedious job from becoming horrible. A good work environment usually leads to better customer service. The reason I'm thinking about this is that I've been looking for a second job. (No, not leaving MPOW, love it the...

I decided that if I get to do a presentation that requires some sort of slides, I will *not* be a failbucket and read from the slides. In fact, I will only use pictures as cues (which I tend to do anyway). In even more fact, I am trying to convince myself to only use appropriate lolcat and failblog pictures. (Heck, every audience loves some amusement. In that vein, expect to see this pic in at least one of my IL08 presentations:

A few things I've been thinking on the flights back to Chattanooga from Anaheim today. One problem with having everyone submit their programs by the end of July for next Annual? Things get stale. If I had to sit through one more talk on how someone implemented a Library 2.0 program I was going to scream. Very few of those had anything new to say about it - if there's no new spin, it's just rehash. I'm not into hash of any kind. Hot Topics and Trends type programs are great, but the rest of the programming suffers a bit. The in-between time. Morning programs ran from 8:30 to 10:30, and then the next program sessions began at 10:30. I don't know about you, but I am not made of magic. Even ten minutes would have been appreciated so that we could have attended more programs per day. Of course, this could be a ploy to give us downtime so we can troll the exhibits and be wooed by vendors. (Props to the Ibis guys for the flying monkeys. Those were a *huge* hit.) ALA should...