Walt at Random

A week ago, my wife and I got together with an old friend for dinner. Partway through, he asked how my new situation–Director and Managing Editor for the PALINET Leadership Network (PLN)–was going. I talked about it for a couple of minutes. He noted (paraphrasing): “You’re really enthusiastic about this. That’s a nice change.”

I thought about that. He’s right–and that helps explain why I haven’t been spending as much time and mental energy on “other stuff” as I’d expected. I find the work I’m doing on PLN interesting, challenging, worthwhile and, well, new.

I believe PLN will be a tremendous resource for library leaders (of all sorts) and future leaders. I’m dealing with some great people at PALINET. I’ve learned enough of MediaWiki’s syntax to be dangerous–and to recast several dozen pages into sensible patterns for searchability and, probably more important in this case, for discoverability through browsing and links. I’ve had first-rate help any time there’s been a technical problem, so that I’ve been able to focus most of my energy on building a coherent structure and clearing away some debris. I’ve gotten used to working at home, and my best friend–who I’ve also been married to for just under thirty years–and I don’t seem to get in each other’s way.

Sure, my enthusiastic approach to PLN has resulted in some slowdown in other work as I pushed through the biggest and most difficult initial phase. That’s been a good thing, by and large–I could afford the slowdown. This week, I got to a critical point: PLN as a whole is in good enough shape to take the “Under Construction” headline off the home page. It will always be changing, to be sure, at least if it succeeds, but the “bones” of the network are now in decent shape, ready to have lots more flesh (content, discussion, whatever) added.

If you’re a wiki connoisseur, you’ll shudder when you hear what I’ve probably finished doing, which is why there was an “Under Construction” banner: After reformatting, recategorizing, editing and moving most essays, and rebuilding the high-level pages pointing to those essays, I went through and deleted huge numbers of redirect pages that were now superfluous. If there had been significant numbers of users, that would be a terrible thing to do, as essay-level URLs would no longer work. That phase is done; I don’t anticipate breaking URLs in the future.

That point came midweek. I deliberately stopped for a while to focus on some future essays for Cites & Insights (and a topic for my next ONLINE column). It’s now clear I’ll have enough for a slightly peculiar January 2008 issue, and I know what the column will be about. The pause was exactly what I needed. Now, back into PLN with a vengeance–to add a bunch more existing material in ways that will make it useful, to start inviting new material, maybe to see where some of my own material might fit.

Yes, I’m still enthusiastic. This is fun. I also think it’s important.

If you’re wondering where all this material in a not-yet-formally-launched platform comes from, PALINET has an arrangement with Frank Hermes and his Library Leadership Network, yielding several dozen excellent essays. That arrangement continues, but I’ll now start working on adding content from other sources and encouraging new commentary and content within PLN itself.

So that’s what I’ve been doing (leaving out loads of details about discussing methodology, evaluating what’s there, working through some little problems, setting up account validation methods, etc., etc.).

And now, an invitation:

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The good people at PALINET have decided to open PLN to the entire library community.The formal launch of PLN will come during the 2008 ALA Midwinter Meeting, which happens to be in PALINET’s headquarters city, Philadelphia.The “soft launch” commenced yesterday, December 8, with the completion of Phase I of startup work.

If you’re interested in PLN and consider yourself a library leader, future leader, emerging leader or potential leader, you’re invited to participate–and certainly encouraged to provide feedback as well.

It’s easy:

• Go to the PALINET Leadership Network and click on the “Log in/create account.” Fill in the new-account form, which just requires a username, a password, an institution name (or whatever you choose to use if you’re an independent), an email address, and your real name in the form you’d like it to appear with your comments and new content. Enter the form.
• Please do use your real name, and it’s easier for all concerned if you use an institutional email address for reasons that may become obvious below–but it’s not a requirement.
• PLN will send you email with a confirmation link. Click on the link (or cut-and-paste the link in a browser) to confirm that you’re a real person with a real email account. Your account is open (and you’ll get a confirming email). You can now read everything in PLN.
• There’s one more step that doesn’t require any work on your part: We (well, me, for now) have to authorize your account for editing and creation. That’s the reason I suggest institutional email accounts if you’re associated with a library: That probably gives me enough to authorize the account without even thinking about it (always my favorite way). Otherwise, I (or we) have to decide whether you look like a spammer or vandal or whether you look “legit.” I/we have a strong bias in favor of approving accounts, to be sure.
• That authorization will typically happen the next business day, sometimes sooner than that. You’ll get another email. From then on, you’ll be able to comment on articles, create new articles, participate in the forums and, for some articles, edit them directly.

That’s a long description of a very simple process, designed mostly to minimize the time we spend coping with spam and vandalism.

You do not need to be a PALINET member. You do not need to be in a U.S. library (or, necessarily, in a library at all)…I certainly expect to see some folks from Canada, Australia and the UK sign up, and quite possibly other countries.

That’s it. I’ll probably be writing more about PLN here and in Cites & Insights in the future. Meanwhile, you can take a look for yourself.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 9th, 2007 at 2:23 pm and is filed under PLN. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.