Tennant on Managing Personal Change

Roy Tennant has excellent advice for librarians: technological change is the norm, you should expect to constantly learn new technologies and discard old ones.This is especially true for those like myself who are one-person library technology shops. Being an "expert" at any particular thing is an unaffordable luxury. We need to be experts at learning about a lot of things, and learning just enough as we need to make things happen before moving on to the next thing.

Tennant expresses this point as "Learn only what is required to accomplish the task before you." As much as I agree, I think this could easily be misinterpreted. A few caveats:

• As one commenter has already pointed out, this means learning enough to know what you are doing, even though you won't explore all the details of whatever tool you're working with. If you learn just enough to know where to apply duct tape and rubber bands, your future self may hate you for it.
• Some skills and technologies are useful to learn even if you don't have an immediate need. Either you're certain to need the skill or knowledge eventually anyway, and/or learning it will help develop ways of approaching problems that will help even if you're using a different tool. Probably everyone has a different idea of what these fundamentals are, and they will change over time, but would anyone disagree that some skills are fundamental?
• It doesn't hurt to learn about things even if you don't have a need to actually learn them. Having an idea of the possibilities will make you better prepared to face a new problem or to reconsider the way you do things.

Getting into our users' workflow

At Worldcat Discovery Day several weeks ago, Lorcan Dempsey of OCLC gave a keynote address titled "Discovery & Disclosure at the Network Level." He touched on a number of interesting ideas about how libraries should be evolving, but the one that seemed the most "actionable" for me is the idea that instead of expecting our patrons to adapt their workflows around our services, we should find ways to integrate our services into their workflows.

It's the old "meet them where they are" idea, updated for the digital age. He mentioned some of the ways libraries already do this:

• Google Books search results include a "Find in a library" link to worldcat.org. This means that for patrons of libraries that list their holdings in WorldCat, a search on Google Books can lead them to the library's catalog or an "ask-a-librarian" web page.
• Google Scholar's Library Links program can include links to library link resolvers in its search results. Then patrons who find article citations on Google Scholar can easily get full text through library-licensed resources.
• The LibX browser plugin provides two ways to suggest that people try library resources: it can provide links to the library catalog when patrons are surfing Amazon.com or other bookseller sites, and it can provide links to the library's link resolver when it finds COINS citations on a web page.

There are two other ideas I hope to explore here:

• We're just starting to use Libguides as a way of creating course and subject guides. My hope is that we will eventually have an appropriate guide for every course the university offers, linked from the course management system. Every student in every course will have a customized entry point to the library easily available in the online counterpart to the classroom.
• We're also just starting to put digital content on line. We may consider contributing items from our photo collections to the Flickr Commons, putting our content in front of flickr users.

Any other thoughts out there? For every system or service we maintain or implement for patron use, we should think about ways to create entry points where our patrons will find them, even if they aren't thinking about the library.