When I started working as a corporate librarian the records office was sparse and uninviting.
I decorated my desk to liven things up.
But this library wouldn’t get a positive transformation until the following year. At the start of 2011, I had to rearrange the desks and bookshelves to accommodate three people as well as visitors. I came up with an innovative layout that provides the people who share this office a hint of privacy but is still welcoming of visitors.
This transformation received many compliments from all staff members and the space is now seen as a useful corporate library!
It may seem to start out slow, but this is a great montage of library scenes in popular film and television. Turns out, it’s a pitch for the video collection available for borrowing at the Greene County Library in Ohio!
After reading this review of The Little Big Things: 163 Ways to Pursue Excellence, I was inspired to order the book from Amazon. The review itself discusses the importance of focusing more on real world events and plain language vs. theoretical scenarios and complex jargon. I’m hoping that the book can fulfill my professional and educational needs, and I’ll even order it for my corporate library.
Add to the list of jobs that are apparently too boring for Americans: sorting books. The New York Public Library has installed an enormous machine in a warehouse in Queens to handle the task of redistributing borrowed books among the city’s branches. The New York Times reports that the automation “has eliminated much of the drudgery since it was turned on two months ago.”
One thing that is clear from this is that if an organization has the funds, it will try to replace bored humans with sturdy machines.
My first reaction to this was to mourn the loss of humans’ ability to do menial, physical tasks, but then I realized that this product is an good example of what happens when ingenuity and economics meet and fall in love. The use of the multi-million dollar machine has cut the need for permanent staff, increased the amount of materials that can be sorted in one day, and decreased the time it takes for books to be transferred between locations. The city will likely see a budget savings over time, and hopefully employ more staff in other departments such as digital archiving and public reference desks.
Most large library systems already contract cleaning services and database providers, so automated inter-library sorting systems could be a potentially good business opportunity. Private markets could share county/regional systems, and governments and schools could have their own networks. Humans still have to do some of the work making sure the machines keep running.
Media coverage is all over the health care reform bill(s). But, there are other pieces of legislation being passed, and some of them, like the Braley Plain Language Act (HR 946) might actually benefit all literate citizens without controversy.
“The Plain Language Act requires the federal government to write all new publications, forms, and publicly distributed documents in a “clear, concise, well-organized” manner that follows the best practices of plain language writing.”
As a corporate librarian who files financial documents, I was particularly interested in the section titled “Clarity in Financial Documents”, and the many external links accompanying the information. I think that at some point during the last few decades, businesses (and local government, too) began to mimic the fancy, big-government dialect, so hopefully this initiative to speak more better will help taxpayers spend more better, too.
According to this excerpt from Best Practices: Reinventing the Corporate Library, “The most successful librarians follow three best practices: 1) spend strategically on resources and staff; 2) make effective content delivery the mission; and 3) redefine information to include history and people.”
But you have to pay $499 (risk free!) to see more than just the outline from this ‘research’.
Knowledge Workers Founder When They Lack High-Quality Information. The definition of ‘founder’ is to fall or sink. so – bad information = submersed librarian? Kidding aside, I hope this part acknowledges that most likely everyone is affected by poor-quality information.
Yet Corporate Librarians Face Information Resource Management Barriers. Yes, most professionals face challenges. Even librarians.
How Workers Get The Information They Need – Interwebz and phone. Sometimes interpersonal communication.
Librarians Must Evolve To Meet New Demands. Yes!
The rest of the outline is devoted to the best practices and other resources on the topic. I’d be interested in reading more about these topics if access to the information didn’t cost as much as an iPad.
How can newly graduated librarians be really effective to a 21st century society if they are operating much in the same way as a librarian who graduated in the 1980′s?
How do we overhaul the knowledge management processes (born in the Industrial Age and stretched thin through the Information Age) without disrupting current workflow?
What is our main purpose now that most of modern society believes that they have become more independent and self-reliant in gathering information?
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16 Jan 2012 at 19:17
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It may seem to start out slow, but this is a great montage of library scenes in popular film and television. Turns out, it’s a pitch for the video collection available for borrowing at the Greene County Library in Ohio!