Getting Out of the Office

As part of the process of going to school and trying to expand my horizons, I really to need to be getting out of the office more – going to conferences, etc. This is something that I have shied away from in the past if possible – as many quiet people would. I doubt that I will ever be an overly social person who longs for more social situations. However, I think I’ve hurt my career and personal development by deliberately avoiding conferences and the like. With this in mind I have registered for two of Nelinet’s upcoming conferences – Nelinet’s IT Conference 2006: Social Networking: Plugging New England Libraries into Web 2.0 and Nelinet’s Annual Bibliographic Services Conference: OPAC 2.0: Reinventing the Library Catalog. I’m actually looking forward to both – but am probably a bit more excited about the OPAC 2.0 conference. OPAC reform is really becoming the issue that seems to be most important to me.

Library 1.0 vs. Library 2.0

Karen G. Schneider has a great post over at Free Range Librarian on L1 VS. L2: Adapated from O’Reilly.  In the post, Karen lists several examples of Library 1.0 technologies and contrast them with Library 2.0 ones. As an example, “Closed stacks – - -> Open stacks.” Of course, all of these examples of Library 2.0 make my head hurt because it makes me realize how much work there is left to do.

Sundays Equal Homework

Sundays were almost made for homework – especially wet, cold and dreary ones. I really didn’t mind too much that I sat in front of my computer all day working on my service exercise – well, except for the fact that I really had some problems with it. I started to write my paper and realized that when I had only started discussing my third technique (out of 10-20) on the end of page two that I was not doing the assignment correctly. I instead decided to use bullets for each point and its summary. That certainly worked much better. I ended up with 11 points which I summarized in just about three pages. I hope my decision to go with bullet points was correct. I seem to spend way too much second guess myself and my work – it is painful to the extreme. In the email that I sent to the professor with the assignment, I wondered if I’m too old to learn to handle the stress of school better.