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Material that supports the study of how libraries and knowledge professionals are trained, how they share their skills, and how their peers view them.

How To Spring Clean Your Goodreads TBR Pile by Amanda Diehl

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04-10-16

 

Spring cleaning is a necessary evil, regardless of whether you’re pruning your bookshelves or something more digital. I was sitting in bed with my boyfriend last week, our laptops open and Goodreads up in our browsers. I was aghast to see that my boyfriend’s to-be-read (TBR) list only had ten books on it. TEN?! Bro, do you even read?

But then he looks over at mine, a digital TBR pile of 1200-plus books. And he scoffed, “Like you’re ever going to read all of those.”

Days later, I was still thinking about that statement. He was right; don’t tell him. I knew something had to be done, so I set to reducing my TBR list as quickly and efficiently as possible. Using Goodreads’ batch edit feature, I can select the books I want to change, then remove them in one click.

Here’s the criteria I used to whittle down my TBR shelf on Goodreads. Feel free to use all of them or just a few according to your reading tastes:

Don’t think about it too hard

This isn’t necessarily some “spark joy” type deal, but I wanted this to be quick. I’m a busy woman with things to do! If you can’t remember the plot of the book or any other details upon reading the title or why you added it in the first place, odds are you won’t miss it if you take it off your list. It’ll be okay! Read more…

 

4 Simple Ways to Be More Original (and Satisfied) at Work by J.T. O’Donnell

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IMAGE: Getty Images

For many people, work lacks freedom – a nagging feeling there’s a set of golden handcuffs keeping you from unleashing your potential. A study by Gallup shows just 13% of workers feel engaged at work. Leaving the majority of the world’s working population wondering how they got trapped in their careers and longing to not be one of the masses. But rather, an original.

Sadly, so few ever take the steps necessary to become an original. Why?

In a word: fear.

In his newest book, Originals, Professor Adam Grant sets upon a journey to debunk the myth being an original requires extreme risk taking. His goal? To persuade you and I that originals are actually far more ordinary than we realize. More importantly, to encourage us all to be more original because of the incredible professional benefits it provides.

2 Paths To Achievement… Which One Are You On?

Psychologists determined years ago achievement is accomplished in one of two ways: conformity or originality. The first stays the proven course. The second takes the road less traveled. Conformity plays it safe, while originality challenges the status quo. It’s not hard to see why we all admire originality – it’s so much rarer than conformity. As a result, it gets labeled as harder.  Read more…

 

Who would be a librarian now? You know what, I’ll have a go

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Remy Cordonnier, librarian in the northern town of Saint-Omer, near Calais carefully shows an example of a valuable Shakespeare “First Folio”, a collection of some of his plays, dating from 1623.

About the only drawback is dismissiveness from my friends and family. A working-class male taking a degree to be a what? Denis Charlet/AFP/Getty Images

 

“Who would want to become a librarian now?” asked an anonymous public servant on National Libraries Day, seeing before them a graveyard of dead libraries and old reference desks filled by volunteers. A valid question, and one to which I’ll reply: “You know what? I’ll have a go.”

I’m training to be a professional librarian, having just finished a lecture on “semantic web ontologies” and “linked data”, and sat dumbstruck in front of a “Dewey Decimal assembler” without a clue as to what I’m looking at. The course is challenging – it’s a three-year master’s degree that bites eye-watering chunks out of my wages. Why am I doing it to myself?

The fact is, I can’t not. It’s a sort of calling – like becoming a priest, only with warmer business premises. I can’t stand by and let public libraries sink. I won’t.

Forget all about reading as a pleasure, forget that children should have unlimited access to books, throw away arguments about libraries being lifelines for those less fortunate – they’re falling on deaf ears. You just have to look at the comments beneath pro-library articles to gather a general response: Kindles, the internet replacing information needs, and so on. And the one we wheel out about libraries being the centre of the community – there’ll be someone swatting that old classic aside with a “and yet the majority of the population doesn’t use them”. Read more…

 

Top Five Skills Required For Librarians Today & Tomorrow

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Because today’s librarians must be experts in dealing with both physical and digital information, we have identified the Top 5 skills every librarian must have, or develop, in order to succeed now and into the future. I will touch on all five today and explore them individually in the weeks to come.

1. Information Curation

Since the primary role of any type of library is information curation, the need for that skill set will never go away. However it will evolve as volume and variety of information expands. As content creation becomes available to all, information curation becomes a more critical skill. Librarians are becoming increasingly vital in the process of evaluating and editing what is most valuable, as well as categorizing and classifying it for easy retrieval and use.

2. In-Depth, High Value Research

The digital information environment operates mostly on a ‘Find It Yourself’ paradigm, a model that has threatened the very existence of librarians. Yet finding what they need and want can be a significant challenge for consumers and users of information. Most people lack good research skills and all of us are dealing with a velocity and volume of information that is difficult to manage. As the proverbial haystack gets bigger, finding the needle gets tougher, making librarians a valuable go-to resource. Read more…

Things To Consider Before Accepting A Job Offer 7 Things You MUST Consider Before Accepting A Job by Ariella Coombs

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Before accepting a job, it’s important to understand a few things about the company (and about yourself). The last thing you want to do is take a job now only to leave in six months because you’re miserable. Here are some things you should think about before accepting that job offer:

1. Do I like the people I’d be working with at this company?

The truth is, you’re not going to get along with everybody, and no everybody is going to get along with you. However, it’s important to realize that you’ll be spending the majority of your days with your co-workers. While you don’t necessarily have to be buddy-buddy with them, you want to make sure you can at least get along so you can work together effectively.

Make an effort to get to know the people you’d be working with before moving too far into the hiring process. This will not only help you learn who they are and if you’d be able to get along with them, but it’ll also strengthen your network within that company. Having good relationships with people who work within your target companies can increase your chances of getting referred in. Read more…