Making the Most of It

While it has been incredibly humbling to be without steady, full-time employment, I have been taking advantage of the time and, well, making the proverbial lemonade.

I have been volunteering as a summer Book Buddy with the Campagna Center's Wright to Read program, located in the City of Alexandria, VA. I meet once a week with a young reader who needs a little extra help solidifying readings skills. This has been a fun and rewarding way to spend time on a Wednesday afternoon.

Yesterday I went for the first time to volunteer my library services at the Ladrey Senior High Rise in the City of Alexandria. They have a great space for the library--lots of light and windows looking out on a courtyard area. The challenge here is to entice the residents to use the library. Right now the library contains a hodgepodge of mostly fiction paperbacks, some periodicals, and a prehistoric desktop computer with access to the Internet, Microsoft Office applications (circa 1999), and my old friend, Mavis Beacon, who teaches typing (that's how I learned back in the day). There are four more newer computers, but they cannot be touched until they are sanctified by the City's Tech God (I'm guessing that the Senior Housing complex is not on the top of the list of priorities....).

Oh, Hello There!

Well, I am back on the grid after a little hiatus during which I spent time without electricity, running water, or communication devices of any kind. I have to say it was pure heaven--hiking, canoeing, making serious headway with Infinite Jest (Yes! I am over halfway!), and spending hours looking at the lake and mountains.

So, I've waded through the mail of various ilk, and am ready to resume my periodic playdates with 23 Things.

What Is In a Name, Anyway?

So, we live in a world that is flooded with information.

There's oodles of it out there just waiting to be wrangled and made sense of (apologies to Mr. Hauge, 6th Grade English teacher, for this grammatical construct). And yet as a profession we still fail to make the connection between what we have been trained to do, and how it translates in the real world to saving users time, money, and maybe some heartache by making that information discoverable, useful, meaningful, and manageable (see Ranganathan's Five Laws).

Over the last couple of years, the Special Libraries Association's Alignment Project has sought to address this disconnect. Recently SLA members have been in a frothy discussion about a name change for the association. For me the L-word is a mixed bag. On the one hand most people have a pretty clear idea what they think a Librarian is:




Unfortunately it's a limited and antiquated idea. On the other hand, Information Professional or Knowledge Engineer can be misleading and confusing. I think it is important that whatever we call ourselves it should convey what we do instead of being a rigidly defined position description or job title. If we want to be taken seriously at the C-level where budgets live and die, then we need to speak in a language that will be instantly recognized by those decision-makers.

I don't really know the answer, but I do know what I love doing, and it's connecting people with meaningful information. It's in the thrill of the hunt, it's in the elegance of the synthesis and presentation, it's in the satisfaction of helping others look good or make a well-informed decision.

Having been laid off from my last job (which I loved--well, not the being laid off part) as a librarian for a trade association, I have some time on my hands. In the midst of conducting a job search and some periodic consulting work, I have decided to finally complete 23 Things through the Special Libraries Association website. I've started this a few times, but my goal is to complete it by the end of the summer. I've dabbled with blogging before, but I plan to be more deliberate and delve deeper this time around.

So, I'm on Things 3 and 4, which is all things Blog.

I am a big reader of blogs and I can definitely see the benefit of this mode of sharing information. While I don't necessarily want to know the minutiae of my neighbor's daily life, her mother may feel otherwise. I do enjoy reading blogs of library and information luminaries like Stephen Abram and Jessamyn West and also the occasional guilty pleasure like Defamer.