The 7 Links Challenge

Today, I was supposed to post my Day 4 for the fifth round of Library Day in the Life. However, I was out of the office both yesterday and today so that would be a fairly uninteresting post. Instead, I'm going to take the 7 Links Challenge issued by Darren Rowse at Problogger a couple of weeks back. Here goes:

1. Your first post: I started my blog with a post that explained my thought process concerning how I actually arrived at the blog's name. What's So Civil About Librarianship? I hadn't read this in quite a while and it's fun to see where my mind was at two and a half years ago. From the standpoint of my thinking in this post, not a lot has changed for me.

2. A post you enjoyed writing the most: While I was at PLA 2008 in Minneapolis, I attended a couple of sessions back to back that really resonated with me. Afterward, I went right back to my hotel room and banged out a post titled Libraries DO Build Communities. I suppose part of what attracted me to taking the 7 Links Challenge was the opportunity to revisit my thoughts from a while back. This post is a great reminder to me that I am not fully implementing at SSJCPL something for which I have a strong belief. Time to re-prioritize a little...

3. A post which had a great discussion: Generally, there isn't a lot of commenting going on related to my blog posts but, in digging back into my earlier writings at The Civil Librarian, I came across a post, The "Customer" IS Always Right!, that I'd forgotten about that seems very relevant to what is happening in my professional life right now: the difference between for-profit businesses and public institutions in terms of desired outcomes. This debate has generated a great deal of debate in San Joaquin County of late (for obvious reasons to anyone who pays attention to my FB and Twitter presences). If you aren't aware of what's happening in San Joaquin County relevant to his issue, you can read my Media Round-up.

4. A post on someone else's blog that you wished you'd written: Hmm. I read a lot of great stuff but nothing jumped out at me so I spent some time browsing through some of the most well-known library-related blogs (and read a lot of new, interesting things while I was at it). The piece that had the biggest impact on me was The Usable Library as linked to at Jessamyn West's always useful librarian.net. I don't even know if you can call The Usable Library a blog post. It's more just a website with a few very salient but easy to forget concepts about making your library as usable as possible to our customers. I'm definitely going to print out the awesome poster and stick it on my the wall of my office on Monday!

5. A post with a title that you are proud of: Where Personal Meets Professional: A Public Management Framework was written at a time where I was feeling particularly reflective about my work. Written not even a year ago, I feel pretty well removed after re-reading it. In fact, it is interesting to me that this post is the kind of thing I need to be actively thinking about even more in my current position.

6. A post that you wish more people had read: I don't really know how many people actually read 12 Seconds Book Reviews! but, as I browse through my past writings, I enjoyed the idea behind this brief post. I still love the idea of a library using 12 Seconds as a tool to tweet out more interesting news concerning what we have available for our customers. SSJCPL is just now really embracing social media as a means of engaging our customers; I think I'll have to talk to Heather and Rena about adding this to our repertoire. And maybe I'll bring back the beard, too ;)

7. Your most-visited post ever: Aside from hits directly to www.civillibrarian.com, Put the Book In Their Hands (however we can) has received far and away the most hits of any post on my blog. This was a result of the post being featured in an issue of American Libraries Direct several weeks back. The interesting thing to me was that I had no idea the post would be included in AL Direct and I still don't know who read it and decided to include it. Regardless, I think the ideas I proposed in the post are viable for public libraries. In fact, in working at the circulation desk earlier this week, I tried to put the notion into play; I had a teenager who needed either Brave New World or Jane Eyre that day (has that ever happened in a library before?).We had neither title on the shelf and the customer didn't think his mom would drive him down the road to the nearest branch where the titles were available. Both of these titles are available for free online and I saw that the customer was holding a phone so I suggested this route to him but, alas, it wasn't a web-accessible phone. As the ubiquity of smartphones grows, though, I'm going to keep this idea in mind.