Library Stuff

Michael always has a way with words (You do read his blog, right?) In one of his latest posts, those words struck me as more important as usual. His honesty should be applauded:

“Because it is the place where the money is. Knowing what a competitor is doing can mean billions in profit—or loss. Think other companies wouldn’t give their corporate eye teeth to know who’s going to put out the next iPod? They would, and they’re working on finding out right now.”

“The nexus of these efforts is what used to be called the company library, an entity that has morphed into the corporate information center. The librarian has become a coordinator of effort by a CI staff, one of their number herself. She is part of the business plan and process, no longer just an archivist of old company reports. That means many things, among them higher pay and prestige, assuming she can keep pace with developments and the endless Niagara of information flowing through her terminals every hour of every day.”

He’s dead on. CI is one of the most exciting (and stressful) parts of librarianship. Clients live and breathe for CI work and it’s our job to make sure that we are part of it. I did alot of this type of work at the law firm for 4 years before my new gig. Now, I’m on the other side: trying to assist in creating and enhancing technologies for CI work from the users perspective. It’s really exciting.

And as far as keeping pace, McGrorty is not alone in his thoughts. See “New Web-Watching Tools Pique Interest of Investors”

Sorry about the lack of posts today. Blogger was misbehaving (again) and I was greeted with lots of 404s and other lovely error messages (I miss Blogger Pro and would gladly pay $20-40 per year to be on a different server).

The outage at Blogger didn’t phase this librarian. I must have put up 20 posts in the lslinkblog today. Again, this is stuff that I would have bookmarked anyway, so no extra time is spent doing this (Consider it a Library Stuff overflow page – I wouldn’t have posted this content to my blog anyway). I also have about 15 posts waiting to be published in Blogger once it decides to start working again. Nothing time sensitive, so I’ll trickle those in during the next week or so. Onward…

The Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development is blogging their annual conference. They also have a link to their feed and, more importantly, a “what’s this” link, describing what a feed is.

He’s on a roll this week, pointing to an important one:

The International Herald Tribune now has a bunch of feeds. 18 of ‘em. Some strange topics…

I will still not subscribe to Web4Lib, even though I can get an RSS feed for it and post directly from their new site. It’s not the way the content is displayed, it’s the content. Listservs are just not my thing. But I’m just the messenger here… (link via‘rarin)