Amazingly six years ago today, I started this blog.  It has changed a lot over the years, becoming more about my personal directing style and approach and less about great web sites, though those are still here too! 

Thank you everyone for reading!  I so appreciate that you make time in your busy days to spend time here.  I am humbled each and every day by your attention.

File this one under If Only I Had the Time!

Freewaregenius is a great blog about freeware software.  They review software that you can use free of charge.  Great huh?

I just know that there are amazing programs out there to help libraries do their work better.  I just don’t have time to install, try it out, uninstall, and do that over and over again.  And really, when I used to do that sort of thing, my computers didn’t survive long without being wiped and having the OS reinstalled. 

Still, I know that it is something that would really be good for libraries to do.  Sadly, it just can’t be me.

Though less exciting than the Newbery and Caldecott announcements, the lists of ALA best books work better to share with patrons because they give so many options for readers.  Check out the many lists available on the ALA website  for teens! 

Here are the YALSA lists. 

This is pretty sweet!  Put multiple links into one shortened link that you can share with your friends, or on Twitter, or on your blog or website! 

The link will take people to the 1link website and have a list of the websites contained in the link.  When users click on Open, they will open all of the links included in the 1link.  Depending on the person’s browser settings it will either open new windows or new tabs for each of the links.

Alright, I admit it, I’m that annoying person in the back of the room.  The one who has a litany of ideas, the one who won’t stop talking even when the crowd gets restless, the one who talks about innovation incessantly, the one who speaks with exclamation points at the ends of all her sentences!   Yes.  I am that person.

Know this.  I know that you are not interested in my points, not interested in my voicing concerns that things are being looked at from purely a negative perspective.  I know that my points fall on deaf ears, get people red-faced, lead quickly to exasperation.

I know.

But I am not going to stop.  And I hope that you will join me.  Feel free to exasperate the people at the front of the room along with me.  Ask the unpopular questions.  Bare your opinions to the glares of the fluorescent lights and the room. 

If you decide to do this, make sure you sit right by me.  Even if our opinions differ I appreciate other mouthy people.  I might even move up a few rows just to sit by your side.

Retweetist compiles the links that are being retweeted the most on Twitter.  Even if you are not using Twitter, this is a great glimpse into the top links of the day.  You can see the "Big Feed" that contains the most-tweeted and most recent links.  Nicely, you can also glimpse the top links for the last 24 hours as well as the Twitter users that get retweeted the most.  It’s a veritable Who’s Who of Twitter and social networking. 

One of the top retweets of today is What Punctuation Mark Are You?  The tweeting feature is built into the questionnaire.  Unsurprisingly, I’m an exclamation point! 

Seth Godin’s blog is one that every librarian should be reading.  Much more than a marketing blog, it is one that offers insight into what we do every day and continually slaughters sacred cows. 

Godin blogged today about being boring.  Boring means that people aren’t talking about you and what you do. It means that you are playing it very safe, because to be unboring takes that critical "willingness to be wrong." 

So as libraries how do we shake that fear that if we are an "unboring" library we will catch grief from our community, our boards, and our staff.  It has to come from the library director.  We have to be the ones willing to be criticized for failed programs, wild ideas, and allowing staff to work more independently and freely.  That’s part of the job.

Seeing the just-released shortlist for Romantic Novel of the Year in the UK got me thinking about how fun it would be to poll patrons about their favorite novels of the year.  A library could poll in specific genres and offer the ability to do write-in votes via comments.  Perhaps a final vote-off for the winners in each genre…

Patrons would love it plus it would help drive traffic and comments on your web site.

I continually find myself arguing on the side of looking at things positively.  I am more than a little "Pollyanna-ish" as my staff can tell you.  And I am sure that it can get annoying.  But I can’t stop, not even when people tell me I have rose-colored glasses.  In fact, when I was interviewing someone for a position here at the library they told me that I was naive to see libraries as such a positive force.  They did not get the job.

I always think there is a solution hidden somewhere, a possibility unexplored and potential to create something.  Here in Wisconsin, our library systems are facing what could be a potentially horrific cut in their budgets depending on what the state budget does.  While others want to focus on the cuts that must be made and potential negative results to libraries, I advocate for looking beyond the dark and dour. 

Yes, I know, it’s a budget cut.  It’s bad.  It is not without costs.  It will have negative impacts.  I’m a public  library director, I’ve seen it before and lived to tell the tale.  I can’t change the fact that there will be cuts, but I can decide how I will face them.

For me, this is the moment to look forward, to see what efficiencies can be made to carry us onward. This is the moment to take chances and make changes that will save money.  This is the moment to try, to risk, to extend ourselves, not to pull inside your shell to safety.  This is when we talk to everyone as a team (system staff, member libraries, other libraries, other systems), when we gather ourselves together to work out the problem.  This is that moment.  And if we approach it that way, our decisions can carry us not only through this dark year but onward.

It is too easy to get caught in the darkness of the possible bleak future.  I ask that we look beyond that, or at the very least build ourselves a lamp to light the way and hold it high together.

If we can’t hold it together, I will try to hold the light myself and shout to the wind about possibilities, potential and opportunity.   But I would much rather do it together.

On one of my favorite non-library blogs, The Happiness Project, I discovered something that works better for me than a New Year’s resolution: Personal Commandments.  These are the rules that you will live by.  I love that they are commandments that can change with what you are dealing with in your life and that because they are truly yours, you can relate and live them to the utmost.

I have a set of personal commandments and also did a set of commandments for myself as a library director.  My hope is that my staff would look at these and recognize them as mine without question.  Here they are:

1. Work hard not long.

2. Treat everyone the way I would want to be treated.

3. Show appreciation and joy.

4. Applaud loudly.

5. Smile, laugh and connect.

6. Focus big not small.

So how about you?  Do you have some commandments you work by or manage by?