To celebrate Monkey Day 2013 I’ve taken MonkeyDay’s lead and made a donation to their featured primate sanctuary, the Jungle Friends Primate Sanctuary. I used to live in Gainesville, Florida, so it feels good to give back to folks doing good things in my community of old.
I ‘liked’ their facebook page too, because monkeys. https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jungle-Friends-Primate-Sanctuary/103301979520
Yes, THAT Kathy Dempsey, the woman I went all fan-girl over when I met her at ALA and asked her to sign my copy of her book, The Accidental Library Marketer. In my mail at work today I found copies of her latest MLS: Marketing Library Services (Nov./Dec. 2013), in which she reviews our book. Here’s a snippet of the review:
One section, titled “First, Take a Good, Long, Hard Look at Your Library Website,” urges readers to assess the ways that they make their databases available. Making them hard to find will of course mean lower usage from the get-go. “On many library websites, e-resources are ‘buried’ so deeply it will take a plucky and resourceful patron to find them at all” (p. 82). When you see that point, it’s immediately obvious, yet how many websites have you come across where that’s the case? […] So it really is necessary to do a great deal of assessment before you even think about writing a marketing plan.
The development of the inaugural Institute for Research Design in Librarianship is going spectacularly well. We’ve had a conference call with both our Advisory Board and instruction team, and are eagerly awaiting the receipt of your applications. The application site opened on December 1, 2013 and will remain open until February 1, 2014. If you are an academic or research librarian and believe that you would benefit from being guided throughout the entire research process in an intensive two-week training environment, consider applying. The eligibility requirements and proposal details may be found at http://irdlonline.org.
This year I’m a Senior Vice President Fellow on our campus, a small group of faculty and staff selected to peek in on how the university is actually run, and what it takes to positively lead an academic institution. In addition to the meetings with my mentor I have been doing a lot of assigned reading and responding to study questions. In the readings for this week’s upcoming retreat is a book section on ‘leading from the middle,’ strategies one may use to respond to the pressures of concern groups. Being in the middle can be stressful, described in the book as a “squeeze.” I’ve enjoyed most of this book, but this week’s reading is really hitting home. This quote is resonating with me:
In higher education, we often need to complain less, talk more openly and directly, and cut each other more slack.
Lee G. Bolman, Joan V. Gallos. 2011. Reframing Academic Leadership. Jossey-Bass. p. 159.
In July I told you about a project that my colleague and I were working on here, to develop a statistics dashboard for electronic resources usage. Our project has progressed to the point at which we are beginning the construction of the dashboard. To help guide our development we turned to the literature, to you practitioners out there, and to the open web to spark our imagination. We evaluated our available options and have decided to move forward using Google Sites as the home base for the dashboard. It is free and inherently customizable, the customization really being the visual thing that drove our decision. The other options included the use of some kind of template, and we frankly didn’t want the clutter that templates can bring to a project.
We presented our idea at the library’s management team meeting, where it was met with a curious optimism. We all know we need this kind of tool but at this point none of us are sure exactly what it will end up looking like or how it will be used. Future assessment of the tool will prove important for further development. The document we used during our meeting, which summarizes what we’ve learned so far is available to you at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1H_Srnc8uaRMPrl5n_97HpKLOVoBiGXxo_tB1OanCU5k/edit?usp=sharing.
I am eager to share the usage data we’re gathering with our librarians, and I hope the data will also be used by other library researchers and those interested in benchmarking. The data will be publicly available on the web (our license agreements do not have confidentiality clauses) and available under a Creative Commons 3.0 License.
Our goal is to have the construction complete by the end of the calendar year. I’ll post again about this when it is ready for you to review. Until then, wish us luck!
Here’s a snippet:
I feel that the book fits well into the general field of marketing – don’t let the ‘electronic resources’ put you off- most of the information is transferable to other resources. The authors are knowledgeable about their subject and I found the book written in a very informal way, similar to the notes you might take at a marketing workshop.
CILIP Health Libraries Group Newsletter, 30(3) September 2013
http://www.cilip.org.uk/specialinterestgroups/bysubject/health
