Happy new year from me and from PLN
Happy new year–and may your 2009 be worlds better than your 2008!
Rather than featuring brand-new content (lots of cleanup work being done–the December 2008 Leader’s Digest is there, but the items haven’t been distributed to other articles yet), let’s look at an important, growing category of the PALINET Leadership Network: Overview articles.
Currently, there are half a dozen overview articles, plus a hugely-revised (and much shorter) What’s here article that could be said to be an overview for the whole site:
- We got trouble… - The original overview, covering more than thirty articles on internal difficulties and possibilities, including issues with employees, management, communication, behavior and organizational structure. It’s not all negative by any means; many difficulties also offer possibilities.
- Listening and speaking, a communication commentary - Articles on internal communication within an organization.
- Open access basics - Both a quick overview for those new to Open Access and a guide to other articles on this vital topic.
- Leader’s guide to open everything - PLN already has strong clusters on Open Access and Open Source, but “open” pops up in lots of other contexts these days. This “shell overview” summarizes the two primary clusters and notes some of the other Opens.
- Blogs and wikis, a lightweight publishing overview - If you don’t use or know about blogs and wikis, and understand the differences between them, you should. This brief article will get you started and guide you through PLN’s rich set of articles.
- Conferences and presentations–why leaders should care - A commentary on the reasons these topics matter to any library leader, and a guide to PLN’s cluster of articles on conferences and presentations.
We’ll probably add more overview articles in the future. As always, we could use your feedback as to which overviews would be most useful, where PLN should have more coverage–and where we could find good resources.
That’s this week’s post on PLN Highlights, the best way to keep up with what’s new on the PALINET Leadership Network–particularly if you’d just as soon ignore this blog.
Personal note
PLN isn’t my “side project.” It’s my primary project–my day job. And no, I personally don’t think face-to-face conferences are going away (but I’m one of those who does learn things in the programs and discussions as well as through casual contact). Otherwise, I probably wouldn’t have been up early this morning trying to get a room for ALA Annual…only to find, eventually, that they’d delayed the starting time. And, another feather in ALA’s online cap, when registration did begin, I found my second choice of hotel already waitlisted…five minutes after registration supposedly opened. (Fortunately, my first choice was still available.) Mystery upon mystery…
January 5th, 2009 at 7:33 pm
A postscript to your personal note. I’m still going to face-to-face meetings too (at least until that is cut from the state’s budget). And I got tired of refreshing the web page so I called a human at about 10:10am today (EST) and got booked into one of the conference hotels. (Hotel 71, to be exact.) That may be why some of them were already waitlisted…
January 6th, 2009 at 8:31 am
OK, so the ALA housing registration process is still broken. The website was changed around 7 a.m./9 CST to indicate that it wouldn’t open until 10 a.m. CST (which it did).
But you were able to *call* before 10 a.m. CST and get a booking. That shouldn’t have happened, and you weren’t the only one. They should not have been booking via phone before they were ready to book via website.
As it happens, the only hotel that was waitlisted was Embassy Suites. (I checked out most of the hotels on the web a few days before 1/5, and for whatever reason, Hotel 71 wasn’t on my list of preferences.)