Walt at Random

Cites & Insights 8:6, June 2008, is now available for downloading.

The 28-page issue is PDF, as usual, but (since My Back Pages is missing) all segments are also available as HTML separates at the Cites & Insights homepage.

The issue consists of:

• Bibs & Blather: Quick Updates: Limits and Slouching - A brief reminder of a timely essay, and a progress report about where things stand on the possible 2007-2008 liblogs project.
• Perspective: On Wikis and Transparency - Transparency is great, as long as you’re aware of it. MediaWiki makes your wiki (and most other wikis) very transparent to outsiders. A good thing, but do pay attention.
• ©3 Perspective: DRM and ISP Surcharges - Comments on the slow death (?) of DRM for purchased audio downloads–and the latest plan to assure Big Media of ongoing profitability.
• Perspective: On Semantics, Reality, Learning and Rockstars - “Reality” in this case: When is a book not a book? Discover the connections between these four mini-perspectives and win yourself a virtual candy bar!
• Retrospective: Pointing with Pride, Part 2 - Selected excerpts and comments on issues past, another part of the centenary celebration.

This week’s post at PLN Highlights, repeated here for your edification…

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What’s new at the PALINET Leadership Network?

• In Looking in the mirror, Peter Bromberg offers a dozen questions you should ask new employees to help gain a clearer picture of your own library–and five questions to ask yourself about where you are and where you’re going. Steven J. Bell asks “are you where you want to be professionally?” and suggests that you define your own signature statement–and Barbara Kelly expands the “signature statement” idea to suggest stepping back and making sure your library has a clear, authentic, understandable and real signature statement of its own.
• Service and policy complements the existing Service attitudes roundup (primarily non-library notes), offering notes from several library writers. Barbara Kelly notes ways she’s been delighted by deviations from policy–that might not be deviations at all, but rather flexible, service-oriented policies. Tyler Rousseau takes on the “teach them to fish” attitude in reference services, suggesting that sometimes “just give them the ichhyo…” might be the best course of action. “Karen K.” offers some lessons in customer service and Walt Crawford offers examples of unusually good customer service and the remarkable effects of being just a little more helpful.
• Jeff Scott adds the perspective of a rural public library director to the discussion in Directors, leaders and work-life balance. You’ll be seeing new additions to other existing articles (especially the sets of notes from non-library sources); this one happened a little faster than most.

Your contributions and feedback help make PLN work. Let us know how we’re doing.

I’ve probably seen the announcement and comments on at least half a dozen blogs by now.

For the One Big Library Unconference, that is. To be held June 27, 2008, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., at the Centre for Social Innovation in Toronto. Organized by York University Libraries.

Here’s the blurb:

“It seems like there are lot of different kinds of libraries: public libraries, school libraries, university libraries, college libraries, law libraries, medical libraries, corporate libraries, special libraries, private libraries. But really there’s just One Big Library, with branches all over the world.”

The One Big Library Unconference is a one-day gathering of librarians, technologists and other interested people, talking about the present and future of libraries. It’s organized and sponsored by York University Libraries and the YUL Emerging Technologies Interest Group.

The first paragraph is in quotes–but with no source or link.

The list of participants already includes a bunch of people I know (at least virtually) and respect: John Dupuis, David Fiander, Amanda Etches-Johnson, John Miedema, Connie Crosby, William Denton, probably others.

I’m sure it will be an excellent day. I wouldn’t be going even if money and time allowed: It’s directly opposite my travel day for ALA Annual in Anaheim. (Well, hey, it’s a Canadian conference. Why should they care about ALA’s schedule?)

And there’s something about it that bothers me. Namely, the premise as stated in that first paragraph.

Sorry, but I don’t buy it as a reality or as a desirable future. I don’t think of Harvard College Library as a branch of The ARL Library, much less Mountain View Public Library, Harvard College Library, NYPL, Hewlett-Packard Corporate Libraries and the Poy Sippi Public Library as all being branches of One Big Library.

I think of all these as distinctive and distinctly local institutions–institutions which, being libraries, are really good at sharing and should get even better at it. But sharing is quite different than being a branch of a whole.

John Miedema’s attending, so I’m assuming the “slow library” perspective–a distinctly local view, where a library is distinctly part of its community–will be represented. I hope so, at least. That’s certainly not the thrust of the unconference description.

Semantics? Maybe–but, as I discuss in an upcoming C&I perspective, semantics–the study of meaning in communication–is to a great extent what makes us human.

So, to all my friends up north, hope you have a great unconference (I’ve never been to one, and that should change), but you can put me down as disagreeing with the anonymous writer of those quoted sentences.

This week’s post at PLN Highlights–the notification mechanism for the PALINET Leadership Network, which you really should join (if you’re not already a member). It’s free, it’s loaded with material, it needs your participation

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What’s up at PALINET Leadership Network (PLN)?

• “Directors, leaders and work-life balance” offers diverse perspectives on two key sets of questions:
  • Can you be a library leader and still maintain a reasonable balance between the demands of work and the rest of your life? To put it another way, can you have it all?
  • Can you be a library director or administrator and have it all?
• We’re trying to make sure you can always explore further and that you can find worthwhile articles in a variety of ways. To that end, we’ve eliminated “orphan articles”–which is to say that every article in PLN has a related-article link from at least one other article. The goal is to have all but the briefest items also have outbound links to the most appropriate other articles. You can help: If you see an article relationship that isn’t flagged, add it yourself or send me a note (crawford@palinet.org).

PLN exists to serve your needs as a current or future library leader. Two current polls on the general feedback page will help us determine how to do that better. Should we provide more technology briefings and commentary (such as the Kindle/ebook cluster)–and should we provide more policy briefings and commentary (such as the Open Source cluster). We need your feedback and ideas to improve PLN–and we encourage you to contribute and to tell your colleagues about the PALINET Leadership Network.

Walt at Random has the most readers of any blog in its class.*

That seems like an appropriate way to begin this little poke at a full-page Chevy ad in today’s San Francisco Chronicle. The ad’s announcing an increase in incentive money, and features three different models. The highway EPA estimate appears for each model–and for two of the three, it’s accompanied by “Best-in-class highway fuel economy” (in one case followed by “with manual transmission.” And, oh yes, there’s a footnote for each of those claims.

The mileage figures aren’t bad, but they’re also not great. Not that I’m a skeptic, but, well, I was pretty sure that the Chevy Cobalt didn’t get as good mileage as a number of other compact cars.

So I did what most readers never bother to do: I read the footnotes.

Here’s the footnote for the Cobalt:

Based on 2008 GM Compact Car 3-Door Coupe segment.

And for the Impala:

Based on Impala with 3.5L engine and 2008 GM Large Car segment.

Isn’t that great? GM’s defining “class” based entirely on cars it manufactures. I don’t know how many “compact car 3-door coupe”s GM makes, but this definitely nicely avoids comparisons with all the compact cars from Honda, Toyota, Kia, Hyundai, Mazda…and even Ford and Chrysler.

Imagine if libraries had advertising budgets and the same approach to facts vs. truth. Every library could really be a star, without much trouble:

Mallsville Public Library answers more reference questions than any other comparable library^

Followed by more promotional material, followed by this substantially smaller footnote:

^Based on libraries that are not part of larger library systems, that serve between 2,000 and 2,500 people and that are located within 10 miles of the Mallsville River. Phone and IM reference excluded for purposes of comparisons.

Fortunately, libraries really aren’t businesses in some key respects…

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* Based on library-related blogs written by semi-retired male non-librarians between 60 and 65 years old, living in California.

Cites & Insights 8:5, May 2008, is now available for downloading.

This 28-page issue (PDF as usual, but each essay is also available in HTML form) includes:

• Bibs & Blather: One Book at a Time - A year’s experience with self-publishing.
• Perspective: Offtopic or Not? Mill Creek & Libraries - Do 50-movie (and 100-movie and 250-movie!) packs make sense for public libraries?
• Making it Work Perspective: Changes in Liblogs: Slouching Toward a Study - How have 227 liblogs changed between 2005/2006 and 2007? Notes toward a possible study of 500+ blogs.
• Net Media Perspective: Citizendium and the Writer’s Voice - Notes on Citizendium and how it’s developing–and why I disagree with one fundamental tenet of both Wikipedia and Citizendium.
• Offtopic Perspective: 50 Movie Hollywood Legends, Part 1 - From the sublime to the ridiculous, from Good News to The Fat Spy, two dozen movies with big-name stars.
• Retrospective: Pointing with Pride, Part 1 - Looking back at “the 1s”–the first, 11th…91st issues of C&I.

What’s up at PALINET Leadership Network? Here’s this week’s post on PLN Highlights.

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This week, new items at the PALINET Leadership Network are largely from the management literature (via Leader’s Digest) or bring together new material to flesh out other articles. For example:

• Searching notes hosts brief notes about searching in general–starting with team searching and Illumin8–and links to some longer articles.
• Ebook notes splits out notes on book-length digital text from notes on Kindle and other dedicated ebook readers.
• Qualities of successful leaders offers notes on qualities of leaders–not just what they do but who they are–and links to longer articles on related topics.
• Leadership development notes serves as a hub for articles on developing leaders and includes brief notes from management literature.
• Open source notes and resources enhances PLN’s cluster of articles on open source software by providing key definitions, linking to articles elsewhere, and offering links to key resources on open source in libraries.

These and other “notes” pages will continue to grow over time. We continue to look for ways to make these and other resources more suitable for your needs. Let us know how we’re doing, specifically in the Feedback and suggestions page and polls and more generally through Feedback pages for each topic.

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Remember: PLN is free and open to anyone who is a library leader or thinks they’ll become one sooner or later–and “library leaders” include managers and directors, but also thought leaders, professional leaders and leaders of innovation.

There’s a wealth of material at PLN on aspects of leadership and many library-related topics. Take advantage of it–and add your own experience and thoughts to the network.

Since a couple of other bloggers have mentioned that they’ll be at TLA (I just spell it TxLA to avoid confusion), here’s my mention–but I think the others actually live there.

I’ll be at the Texas Library Association Annual Conference this coming week–arriving Tuesday early afternoon, leaving Friday morning. Staying at the Hyatt Regency.

Presenting “Balanced Libraries: Books, Bytes and Web 2.0″ on Wednesday, from 2-3:50 p.m.

No, I’m not going to talk nonstop for an hour and fifty minutes…not that I couldn’t, but nobody deserves such punishment. I’m planning to talk for a little less than an hour. The nature and flow of the talk will depend on who’s there, to some extent. The talk will certainly be based on Balanced Libraries: Thoughts on Continuity and Change. Among other things, I expect to offer some notes on work in progress–some of which will appear in Cites & Insights a few days after the conference. There will definitely be plenty of time for discussion.

It will be my third time at TxLA, and appears to be my speaking trip for this year (although that could always change). I will be a small part of a program during ALA Annual, but I’d be going there anyway.

As always, when I speak at a state/regional library conference (my favorite kind of speaking), I try to go for most or all of the conference. I certainly plan to be at the Tuesday all-conference welcome party, spend time in the exhibits, and attend some programs. I always enjoy meeting people I haven’t met and seeing people again…

I could say “posting will be light for the next week,” since I still travel without computing technology (OK, OK, so I will have an ugh cell phone and my cute little MP3 player), but posting here is so erratic that there’s no point.

Admittedly, this all assumes that American–my favorite airline–has its MD80s fully in the air by Tuesday, since that’s what I’ll be taking between San Jose and DFW, but that seems like a pretty safe bet…

Here’s this week’s post at PLN Highlights–and, as always, I encourage you to sign up for the PALINET Leadership Network and add PLN Highlights to your aggregator (or subscribe to posts via email).

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What’s happening at the PALINET Leadership Network (PLN)?

New articles include notes by Steven Bell on Innovation and control and some new Mentoring notes from the business literature. We’re continuing to add links so you can keep exploring a topic once you find a worthwhile article.

Two new features may also help you find worthwhile articles and notes:

• Every topic (the twelve primary categories in the topics sidebar) now shows a “Feature article of the month” at the end of the list of Recent articles. These articles aren’t necessarily the must-read articles or the best of PLN. They are articles that may deserve more attention than they’ve received recently. You’re encouraged to take a look–and to add criticism or commentary as appropriate.
• We’ve also added What’s hot at PLN? This page shows the 25 articles viewed most often during a given period–currently March 7 and April 6, 2008. Typically, that list will be updated once a month, sometimes a little less often. This isn’t exactly “Greatest hits of PLN”–it reflects recent readership, not overall readership.
• Assembling that first “What’s hot” page–taken directly from log analysis, but with most Topic, Category and Help pages removed from the list–we removed one additional page, but maybe it’s worth highlighting here. The General feedback and suggestions page was viewed a lot–but had no content other than the header. So, to get you started, we’ve added a couple of polls on content within PLN. Please respond to the polls (you can add a message)–and, of course, add your own suggestions there or on the feedback page for each topic, or start a discussion in the PLN Forums.

Know people who are or might be library leaders and haven’t heard of PLN? Tell them about it and encourage them to join. And if you have acquaintances who have PLN accounts but aren’t getting these posts–encourage them to sign up. PLN Highlights is the best way we have to keep you informed on what’s happening at PLN. We won’t flood your aggregator or inbox, but we will try to let you know what’s new.

Looking for deep thoughts? Boy, have you come to the wrong place…

Disappointment: We watched The Bourne Ultimatum on Saturday night. We’d seen The Bourne Identity. Somehow, the second flick (these are flicks, not films) is way down on our Netflix list… Anyway: A little ways in, my wife noted that she didn’t remember the plot of the first flick. At the end, we agreed there was a reason: Neither of us would remember the plot of this one two weeks later, much less a few months later. Lots of action, lots of car crashes, no heart, no real plot… A flick many people would love, but it sort of felt like a waste of a couple of hours. (If you love the Bourne flicks or novels, more power to you. Just not really our thing.)

The Pearl Rule (if I have it right): When I picked up a few books at Mountain View Public Library last time around (three weeks ago–I’ll take them back later this week), one of them was George Carlin’s 2004 book. I seem to remember liking George Carlin as a comic–snarky, a little mean-spirited, but literate and funny–so expected th like the book. Five or six pages in, I realized that it wasn’t so much a book as a bunch of little observations slapped together in no apparent sequence–like a blook, but less coherent than most of those. OK by me…

Then, a few more pages in, I found that I was getting lots of dystopian views, an enormous amount of bitterness, and damn little humor. And, speaking of “damn,” a different four-letter word was being used to an extent that, frankly, comes off as a lack of a real vocabulary. That word can be effective used sparingly. When we start a movie where it’s used in every other line of dialog, we usually don’t bother–and here, it seemed to show up at least every couple of paragraphs. Sure, that reduces the shock value–but it also means the prose reads badly.

Well, OK, no problem: You’re not going to like every book you pick up, and apparently Carlin’s aged differently than I have. He’s turned into one of those who frowns upon any questionable pleasures that don’t happen to be his own while, of course, frowning even harder upon anyone who disagrees with him. And somewhere along the way, he seems to have lost his humor.

I made it to Page 38. Which is where the Nancy Pearl Rule comes in, if I remember it rightly.

That rule? Once you’ve decided to give a book a try, you should give it a fair try–which starts out as being “read the first 50 pages,” but as we age, we find that life is too short. Thus, the rule as I remember it: Read the first 100 pages minus your age–so, for me, the first 38 pages.

Over the last couple of months, I had the other half of the Nancy Pearl Rule, in both cases with Connie Willis novels. (I love Connie WIllis’ short stories, but hadn’t really been familiar with her novels.) To Say Nothing of the Dog was, for some reason, a little difficult–maybe because I was initially reading it in short spurts, which wasn’t the way to read it. But at Page 38, it was clear that I should give it a few more pages–and by Page 100, I was hooked. This month, I picked up her Doomsday Book–which is a big book (578 pages in the mass-market paperback my local library has) and “five years in the writing.” It also took a little getting into, because it is a big, serious book–but by Page 38, I knew I was going to read the whole thing. And loved it, of course.

Then there’s Donald E. Westlake and a newish Dortmunder novel, What’s So Funny? With Westlake, I don’t need 38 pages. On the other hand, his prose is of a sort where you go through 38 pages pretty quickly…and just keep turning those pages. Not big, serious books, but I do love ‘em.

Now to read that serious librarianship book I agreed to review…

Back in November 2006, I wrote this post–or, rather, I cut it out of an Offtopic Perspective in Cites & Insights and used it as a post, with slight updating.

Since then, I’ve been staying on the treadmill, watching those old movies (and in some cases TV movies), posting each time I get through one disc, and adding a new Offtopic Perspective each time I finish half a box (six DVDs, once in a while seven DVDs). For a while, it seemed as though the company–now named Mill Creek Entertainment–was running on empty, just distributing the 20-odd sets they’d assembled from public domain, TV movies, and other sources where they didn’t need to pay royalties.

A couple of weeks ago, Seth Finkelstein of Infothought sent me an odd email, assuring me it wasn’t spam and he wasn’t getting a commission. He reads C&I sometimes, and knew I watched these old flicks. He saw that BestBuy.com was having a two-day sale (sorry, it’s over): Two of the 50-movie packs for $25. I didn’t really need any more movies–I’m on disc nine of one set and disc seven of another, with two more packs (100 more movies) waiting after that–but, hey, 100 movies for $25 is a pretty good deal. So I checked it out–and found a couple of sets I wasn’t aware of, one of them released last month. I ordered two of them (that’s right, I now have more than 200 movies waiting to be watched–I intend to keep using that treadmill for years to come), and decided it was time to take another look at Mill Creek Entertainment.

Here’s what I found: The company’s active–and they’ve come up with some even bigger packs. As I write this, there appear to be thirty different 50-movie megapacks, up from 21 in late November 2006. 50-packs I don’t remember seeing before include Box Office Gold, Combat Classics, Drive-in Movie Classics, Family Fun, Frontier Justice, and Nightmare Worlds.

There are also eight hundred-movie packs–most of them straight combinations of 50-packs with no duplications (e.g., Action Classics combines the Action and Suspense 50-packs), all of them (I believe) composed of movies that are also in 50-packs. There were already some smaller subsets of 50-packs and that continues–I see 24 20-movie packs and nine 10-movie packs. (I could see some people going for the 20-pack of John Wayne flicks, most of them early and short, and some of the thematic packs are interesting.)

For libraries where the “informal circulating collection” model suggested in the earlier post might make sense, Mill Creek now has something else to offer:

250-Movie Packs.

That’s right. Four packs–Family Collection, Horror Collection, Mystery Collection and (predictably, given the 50-packs) Western Collection. The “foil collectors boxes” still have individual cardboard sleeves for each disc. So you’d have 240 informally-circulatable items, each with four or more old movies, for a total outlay of no more than $400 and probably significantly less.

Make that definitely significantly less, if you can buy from Amazon: I see all four 250-movie packs available for $50 each. That’s a thousand old movies for $200–less than a buck per circulating DVD.

I’m not shilling for Mill Creek. There are a couple of the 50-movie packs I’d be reluctant to buy for myself or a library (a couple recent packs are heavy on R-rated schlock), and lots of these movies are from damaged prints, nearly all VHS-quality or worse. When they say “Carefully digitally remastered,” they mean the movies were converted from analog to digital form: Otherwise, they couldn’t put them on DVDs. It does not mean restored or anything of the sort: Not at these prices!

That said, Mill Creek Entertainment is doing a fine job of using the public domain for all it’s worth, and I think that’s a good thing. Sure, you can download a lot of these movies–but why bother?

I just checked Amazon a little further. They appear to have all thirty 50-movie packs at $13 to $18 each) and all eight–whoops, all nine 100-packs (there’s one that isn’t even on Mill Creek’s site yet, and it won’t actually be out until May 2008)–at $27 to $45 each.

Mill Creek has some other stuff–collections of cartoons (300 in one box), TV boxed sets and TV-movie mixes, even a few indie movies and fitness sets. But mostly, Mill Creek is boxes of public domain movies at fair prices. The prints may be (and usually are) mediocre, and lots of the pictures are B or less–but there are also some classic gems. Within the last two weeks, I’ve watched McClintock! and the original, black-and-white, Irene Dunne/Charles Boyer Love Affair. Good stuff.

Here’s an honest question, where I’m actually looking for advice–although, admittedly, factors beyond email and comment responses could influence my decision.

The question:

Would a really big look at liblogs, including lots of year-to-year change data, be a good idea, a waste of time, or a positively bad idea?

Definition: “Liblogs” = what Steven Cohen calls “libr* blogs”–that is, blogs by “library people” as opposed to official library blogs, but not limited to blogs by MLS-holding librarians (as if there was any way to know!).

Now, if you already have an answer without reading further, great: send me email or comment below. If you actually want a little clarification…read on below the fold.

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Really big look: The population for the new study would consist of:

• All the blogs in my 2005 “60 interesting blogs” survey that are still active. (See this essay or this issue.)
• All of the 213 blogs in my 2006 study of “the great middle” that are still active. (See this issue–since the essay is essentially the entire issue, it’s a better bet than the HTML version.)
• A bunch of others–including those mentioned in Meredith Farkas’ “favorite blogs” study, those in LISWiki’s blog list that weren’t included in 2005-2006, those in the LISZen source list, those in Dave Pattern’s “library blog cloud” source list, and those I just discovered on my own–that meet the base criteria.

Base criteria for those that weren’t in one of the other studies:

• In English
• Not clearly defined as an official library blog
• Somehow at least vaguely related to libraries or library people
• Reachable
• Established before January 2008
• At least one post between August 31, 2007 and March 1, 2008
• “Visible”: The sum of Bloglines subscriptions and Technorati “authority” in the first two weeks of March 2008 is at least nine.

If I do the full study, there would be one more criterion, for blogs that weren’t in earlier studies: “Semi-active”–having at least one post in two of the three months March, April, and May 2008.

That population–not including the final criterion–is now 542 blogs, including 48 added from Farkas’ “Favorites” report, 81 added from LISZen, 37 added from LISWiki, 9 added from the cloud, and 29 others (items were added in that order–if something was added from LISZen, it wouldn’t also be added from LISWiki).

Lots of year-to-year change data: If I do this, I’d have the following:

• March-May 2007 data for all blogs for which it’s available, noting that data would be limited to what’s reasonably available. (E.g.: If the archives for a blog hide most of each post, I’ll include post count and comment count, but not length of posts–I’m not going to take a sample and extrapolate, and I’m sure not going to retrieve each post individually!)
• March-May 2008 data for all blogs.
• Comparisons between 2007 and 2005 for 43 blogs that were in the 2005 report and not the 2006 report.
• Comparisons between 2006 and 2007 for surviving blogs that were in the 2006 report.
• Comparisons between 2007 and 2008 for all blogs available in both periods.

If I do this, I’d establish norms and quintiles based on real populations: Thus, overall length and length per post would only include blogs with easily-retrievable full-text archives; comments overall and comments per post would exclude blogs that clearly don’t allow comments (or that have comment counts hidden in archives).

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An honest question, this. Last weekend, I did enough experimenting to conclude that it may be feasible to do this megastudy this summer/fall–and I’m planning to do the 2007 metrics for 2005 and 2006 inclusions (they’re about 1/3 done already) for my TxLA appearance. A lot of work for five minutes out of a 50-minute presentation, but it should be interesting.

So the question is: Do I do the other 2007 metrics and do I plan for the big project?

If I don’t, I’ll turn the current project into one or more blog posts or C&I articles.

If I do, I’ll produce a book. It might even have one-sentence summaries of what I believe to be each blog’s focus and strengths–but only when I have something nice to say and am capable of reading the blog. I wouldn’t include a full sample post for each blog; I might include a paragraph. I would have a little writeup on each one.

So: What’s your opinion? (I’m not asking “Would you buy the book?” Different question.)
Note: If someone offers me another part-time gig, this whole discussion might be moot.

Yes, I know, this post is two days early: On any normal day, I’m the last one who would be trying to answer that question, for a variety of reasons (most of which I’ve mentioned).

But that’s the title of Dorothea Salo’s post (which in turn links to some related posts), and I think it’s an interesting, challenging read.

Which is just about all I’m inclined to say about that.

Oh, except for one correction clarification note: Dorothea sez:

Speaking of Walt, who’s a systems analyst by training and trade,

Well..I was never trained as a systems analyst (or as a programmer, for that matter), unless you consider the extent to which the Rhetoric program at UC Berkeley (technically, Speech most of the time I was there) included the study of logic.

By training, if anything, I’m a writer and editor–although, there again, it’s mostly self-taught (thus letting a bunch of teachers off the hook). And it looks as though that’s my trade at this point, by design or happenstance. Since I started doing that (that is, writing for publication and editing other people’s writing) years before I started doing library systems work, you could say that I’m a writer and editor who had a really worthwhile day job as a library systems analyst for a few decades.

I’ll probably always be an analyst (and synthesist, which I regard as more significant if only because it’s more unusual and less teachable); it’s in my nature.

That’s a sidebar, to be sure. Do I agree with everything in Salo’s essay? Of course not. Does she raise a lot of important points and state them well? Of course.

(Would I take an honorary doctorate? Certainly, especially if it included an interesting trip/speaking combination. I’ve spoken at four library schools in the past and enjoyed it each time. But, well, I’m not going to hold my breath.)

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The use of crossed-out text in blogs doesn’t always mean you edited it post-publishing. It’s also a cute way to indicate you’re not quite sure what term you want to use, and are ducking the issue by using more than one. But you knew that already, right?

I’m reposting this week’s PLN Highlights post as usual; you’ll find the post below the line. We continue to add worthwhile, interesting, sometimes provocative content to the PALINET Leadership Network, PLN–free to all current and future library leaders, requires a minute or two to sign up (and clicking on one email link)–and we need library leaders to join and actively participate, commenting on what’s there and providing (or pointing to) new resources.

In the last couple of weeks, we’ve added two particularly interesting and provocative pieces, one on future possibilities for library catalogs (although “library catalog” might not be the term you’d use) and one on future possibilities for “OpenLibrarianship,” a term Carl Grant proposes. (Is OpenLibrarianship really Librarian 2.0? If so, that may be a good thing.) The latter is a case where a little bit of conversation has improved the presentation: I added a comment on the first article to its Talk page, and Carl responded by writing an essay that refines and extends the original commentary. More active participation can only improve PLN for everybody.

In a side note, what happened with Carl Grant’s piece is what would happen with any piece that makes a useful contribution to PLN–even if I personally disagree with it. I’ll edit for clarity (a process that usually involves very few changes). I’ll add Related Article links (and I’m trying to make sure that every new PLN article is linked to by at least one other article). And if I take issue with the article, I might comment–but on the Talk page or in a separate article, not by manipulating what’s there. PLN isn’t my network; as managing editor, I’m there to recruit, refine and link, not to control.

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It’s been a busy week at the PALINET Leadership Network, PLN. Some of the new resources:

• Telling the library story — the March 2008 LLN Peer Panel question is about information literacy, but the responses are mostly about telling your library’s story…and making sure that your library’s reality matches the story you’re telling. George Needham, Jamie LaRue and Lirene Roy offer comments.
• Challenges in developing library information literacy programs — Glen Holt discusses some real-world issues in library information literacy and orientation programs.
• Who needs reference librarians? — Jamie LaRue asks that question in his newspaper column, says the answer is “we all do,” and offers ways those reference librarians can become more visible and valuable.
• A call for OpenLibrarianship — Carl Grant offers a challenging set of proposals for today’s and tomorrow’s librarianship and proposes a term to go along with it. Walt Crawford added a comment on the Talk page, which inspired Grant to write another piece refining the first one: OpenLibrarianship: A framework discussion. These are noteworthy, provocative pieces. Is OpenLibrarianship really Librarian 2.0?
• Real men aim for maximum gadgetude — Jamie LaRue again, this time with a true confession from a one-time Kaypro II owner.

As with last week’s Future catalogs: food for thought, Carl Grant’s articles deserve extended discussion as possible visions for tomorrow’s libraries. The talk pages are open, as are the forums. PLN–free to all current and future library leaders (however you define “library leader”)–is there for discussion and to exchange information.

In the category of exchanging information, one PLN participant has posed an interesting query on the Talk page for leadership training, mentoring and other resources: Are there resources to help interim library directors do their jobs as well as possible? Your suggestions are welcome.

Note: Some of the links above won’t work unless you’re signed in as a PLN user. So join up: It only takes a minute or two, along with clicking on a link in an email message.

Cites & Insights 8:4, April 2008, is now available for downloading.

The 28-page issue is PDF as usual (or not as usual–I’m now using Word 2007 and Microsoft’s free PDF-output download), but HTML separates are available from the C&I homepage

The issue includes:

• Bibs & Blather - a very short introduction to the issue and what got left out.
• Library Access to Scholarship - Harvard and Institutional Repositories
• Old Media/New Media Perspective: Thinking About Kindle and Ebooks
• Making it Work Perspective: TechNos and TechMusts

By the way, if you know anyone who’s been getting issue alerts via email, let them know they need to sign up for C&I Updates or Walt at Random; Topica no longer accepts my posts (and entirely lacks help/contact info).