Ab’s Blog

My spouse and I have a running joke concerning all the words you can’t spell without ab: abnormal, fabulous, flab, absent… you get the idea. I certainly didn’t intend to go the better part of a year without posting, that’s for sure. Sorry for leaving you all with a cliffhanger. It turns out that ERM implementations combined with Other Stuff Going On hasn’t produced prolific blogging, and now that I’m working on some other things in my day job, I’m going make a few more general comments than originally planned.

1. Know why you are getting an ERM. It’s not the solution to all your e-resource problems; you need to be clear going in on what led someone to plunk down the big bucks.

2. Understand whether software really addresses your reason(s) for getting an ERM. If you have communication problems among library staff, for example, an ERM could help by exposing information to more people. But if the communication problem is that your license negotiator hoards signed agreements and doesn’t share the terms, the ERM probably won’t solve that.

3. Don’t confuse ERM with the need to re-evaluate, streamline, and change staffing and workflows so you can work effectively with electronic resources.  It seems not uncommon to look at staff processes along with an ERM implementation, and I think that’s fine - as long as enough background work has been done to understand the probable causes for getting an ERM, regardless of whatever reorganization may take place.

4. Remember why ERM systems were invented in the first place. We’ve all struggled to capture data that can’t be easily stored in the ILS.  Sure times change, and there may be added benefits in an ERM that weren’t thought of a few years ago, but when you’re planning for ERM I think it’s worth reminding yourself of this often. Start with your core functionality and top priorities and work from there.

That’s all for today, kids.  If you’re reading this, thanks for hanging in with me for the past year!

I’ve added a long-overdue contact form on the home page. I’ll be tweaking the sidebar, too, to make the form easier to get to. Drop me a note!

One of the hardest things I’ve done professionally was to document and transfer to someone else the work of being an e-resources librarian. I knew what I did; I had e-mail and spreadsheets and gray hairs to prove it. But to set it all out for other people, to include the exceptions and asterisks, and to help them make sense of it all - well that’s difficult.

If you have an ERM in your future, whether it’s open source or commercial, then you will be faced with a similar task sooner or later. One of the difficult things about implementing an ERM is that you are confronted with the need to know exactly how you do things, whether you’re happy with how you do things, and probably with the need for some sort of group consensus as well.

In upcoming posts I will discuss in more detail:

1. Data,
2. Workflows, and
3. Interoperability

At a recent training session, some of the attendees got a little restless and found the “just for fun” links off the student gateway page. Since I was conducting the training, I didn’t have the luxury of checking the sites out myself, so it was not until today that I finally experienced the 30-Second Bunnies Theatre Library. (Try the James Bond Medley.)

Closer to home, Lorcan Dempsey has written recently about the network reconfiguring the library systems environment.

The Thingology blog has a nice visual post about tag clouds and the concept of “fauxonomy”.

Going back a few weeks, Meredith Farkas wrote about listening to our patrons and actually addressing their concerns, illustrated with a story about Car and Driver magazine.

If you need another diversion, please see my own standby, National Geographic News, for giant squid. Or check out some smart cars.

for I have returned from an offline vacation just as the NY Times article is making the rounds of the blogosphere, and it is standing between me and all the quality blog posts further down the page.  I have no further comment, except to say that things are looking pretty good for the American League tonight… now that’s important.

If you haven’t taken an offline vacation yourself recently, may I suggest one?  I don’t mean no work; I mean no e-mail, no blogs, no web surfing.  I didn’t log on - except to reserve a boat ride - from Tuesday morning to Sunday night.  I wish the trip could have been longer, but six days of walking, hiking, boating, and eating seafood is enough to put things in perspective and provide sustenance for, um, reading a dozen posts about thrifty, tattoed librarians.

G2G - it’s bottom of the 9th, 5-4 and 1 out left!

Librarians are totally the new “It” girls!

Fred Flare says so.

Did you know this?  I sure didn’t.

For all you techie troubleshooters out there,

Apparently since Windows 2000, you’ve been able to copy the entire error message to your clipboard by hitting the universal copy shortcut, Ctrl-C (who knew?!).

No more SnagIt just to get a copy of the text.

Post via LifeHacker.

My stats go up the less frequently I post? I don’t know whether to be flattered or offended.  It must be all the puppies.

Last weekend at NASIG I attended a panel session at which several librarians discussed their career choices and described their jobs at organizations such as consortia and subscription agents. It was a pretty good session, and one which I understand pops up at NASIG every now and then.

One phrase that kept coming out of the mouths of the panelists, however, was “the dark side.”  Now I like a good Star Wars reference as much as the next person, but as someone who just made the switch from working in a library to working for a library software company, I found it a bit perturbing.  When I started telling people about my new job, the only people who used that phrase were in sales, and I don’t recall anyone who works at a library using it during the panel session.

I’m sure there are librarians working in libraries who do think those of us in industry have gone to the dark side, but for the most part that has not been my experience. If we want to change perceptions about what we do and why, we should at least give ourselves a little credit and leave the “dark side” comments to, um, the Harrison Fords of the serials world.

I think I first read about Twitter on Creating Passionate Users, but soon thereafter it started popping up on a lot of library blogs I read.  I didn’t want to get crushed in the stampede, so I waited out the buzz until this weekend when I got talking about it with a friend and decided to set up an account.  If you’re interested, you can find me at acbtanya, but be forewarned: I have no idea how or how often I’ll use it.