American Libraries editor (and filmmaker) Dan Kraus has crafted a fabulous video to introduce the staff. I’m so jealous. Maybe I can be in his next film…

Today, I had to be home to let a repairman into my condo, so I’m working from my “home office.” I love how the march of technology has made this possible. I can connect to the same things remotely that I can while I’m sitting in my little office on Huron and Wabash.

There are definitely things to enjoy about this occasional gig. No commute. I’m wearing sweats and slippers and don’t have a stitch of make-up on. The downside is that my upstairs neighbor is a work-from-home computer consultant. She’s very little…can’t weigh more than 80 pounds…but she has a habit of galloping through her condo, which makes all the china in my cabinet shake. (At work, Booklist’s Bill Ott has his office on the floor right above mine…I never hear a peep from him).

Anyway…maybe she’s galloping for joy at being able to work from home. I sometimes think that would be a great gig. But, by the end of the day, I’m not so sure. I feel out of sorts. Sickly, shut in, lonely…

Ironically, the manuscript I happen to be working on right now is veteran consultant Ulla de Stricker’s: Is Consulting Right for You? A Primer for Information Professionals. She provides a good case for all the consulting opportunities for librarians and others in the knowledge biz. And, she goes through all the plusses and minuses. Yep…one of the big plusses is being able to avoid the commute and wear your bunny slippers to work when not calling on clients. But, she is pretty good about helping the reader think through the downsides too…for instance, the loneliness, the fact that you have to rustle up said clients, and the fact that the income may be unsteady until the business develops.

Ever thought about being a consultant? If so, this is a great book for librarians and others in the information business (who, by the way, have great skills that are well-suited to consulting). Among other things de Stricker discusses in the book (like setting up shop, finding gigs, developing your “professional partnerships” [with accountants, IT people, etc.], negotiating contracts, pricing your services…and much, much more!), she asks readers the fundamental questions they need to ask themselves. Am I cut out for this? Does this sound like you:

When librarian consultants discuss among themselves the key reasons they are successful, they often focus on a set of personal characteristics that enable them to tackle the challenges associated with project work and deliver the results clients want. Key among those characteristics is a rock solid belief in their own abilities and a capacity to avoid becoming depressed or insecure as a result of any untoward project experience.

That ability to roll with the punches is key, as are some other important characteristics. Patience, emotional detachment, comfort working alone, time management, being able to see the forest as well as the trees. There are some skills that are innate, others that can be picked up, she says.

Anyway, this will be a great read for anyone who’s ever thought about being a consultant or, who may be trying to get his or her consulting business off the ground.

As for me? I’m glad I live in a time where working from home, if necessary, is possible. But, I think I’ll be just as glad to catch the Red line to be among my colleagues tomorrow.

Because I use blogs as one way of keeping up with the profession and, ultimately, as a method for gathering new book ideas, I try to keep current on my reading. Conferences, sicknesses, and an influx of manuscripts have conspired against me so far this year, however, and I am rather behind. My aggregator of choice is Google Reader, which organizes the incoming posts strictly by date of post rather than grouped by feed. This keeps me honest in reading a wide range of opinions; with my old aggregator, which organized by feed, I’d lapse into reading only a handful of my favorites. But, this by-date arrangement also makes it very obvious exactly how far behind I am.

For a while I was running two months behind, but once I got through all of the Midwinter Meeting posts, I quickly caught up to being at a steady one-month lag. And I must say, I rather like the view from here. After a month, I can read the post and all the comments in one sitting. And in case you haven’t been listening to the social software gurus, let me tell you, it’s all about the conversation. A so-so post can take on new depth when bolstered by comments and rebuttals. A post that seemed convincing and insightful when I was speed-reading it over lunch can look positively moth-eaten in light of another’s counterpoints offered after a more considered reading than my own.

Yes, I hear you—Subscribe to the comment feeds! you say. But it’s not the same. For me, getting the conversations in bits and pieces ruins the effect. So here I’ll stay for a while, a month behind the leading edge, but right in the middle of the conversation.

I’ve been happily buried under lately, reading some interesting manuscripts (which I hope to find time to blog about later). But, this afternoon, I realized that I’d better start getting my schedule together for the ACRL conference, which is just weeks away(!).

I am looking forward to seeing some of our authors there, and, in general, just soaking in the buzz. There are many, many challenges in academic librarianship, but also some interesting ideas floating around. One focus of mine in the past year or so has been to build into our list some practical titles that offer solutions to some of these challenges. A couple of days ago, I gave you a taste of the Susan Gibbons book coming out on the Net Gen student.

Recently, I put into production another manuscript I’m excited about: Steven Bell and John Shank’s Academic Librarianship by Design: A Blended Librarian’s Guide to the Tools and Techniques. You may have heard Bell and Shank speaking about their vision of the new role for the librarian: the blended librarian. This idea reflects the authors’ conviction that, to thrive, academic librarians must be better integrated into the teaching and learning processes at their institutions. In addition to library skills, the blended librarian brings in information technology and instructional design skills. The book is organized around “design thinking”, which affects everything librarians do, from collaborating with others on campus, having a presence on course management systems, helping faculty save time, and creating digital learning materials. As they talked about instructional design, this section jumped out at me.

Academic librarians, at the core of the profession, are educators. Whether they work in public or technical service areas, the work of academic librarians is directed to helping students and faculty achieve academic success. Instructional design is a set of skills that are used by many educators to create products that enable people to learn more effectively. We think instructional design has the potential to help us make that success possible, and that is owing to the improvements it can bring to how we approach the construct and implementation of new services and resources. Along the way another powerful influence in the development of our ideas and practices is design thinking….

To tell you the truth, I don’t even want to know how these two authors pulled off getting the manuscript to me on time. Both are impressively busy. Steven Bell, as you probably know, is nothing if not prolific, with a number of blogs, journal articles, etc., to his name. I have never asked him this, but I suspect he’s one of those who can get by on four hours of sleep. They have started a new blog, Designing Better Libraries, that expands on some of the “design thinking” ideas that are behind the book.

Recent other additions to our list that will be especially interesting to the academic library crowd:

Creating the One-Shot Library Workshop: A Step-by-Step Guide by Jerilyn Veldof. The one-shot lesson continues to be the vehicle by which many academic librarians provide information literacy and bibliographic instruction. I’m a sucker for practicality, and this book is a gem in its step-by-step approach. And, it shows how to deliver the information so it sticks in those undergraduate (and graduate) minds.

Information Literacy Assessment: Standards-Based Tools and Assignments by Teresa Neely. Again, very practical. Neely frames the book in the context of the ACRL standards and, using best practices from the U.S., Canada, and Australia, provides assessment examples to see how well students are developing their information literacy skills and assignments designed to sharpen those skills.

Today, I hope to put into production a manuscript by University of Rochester’s Susan Gibbons. The book is about “Net Genners”—the now college-aged contingent who grew up spending their after-school time being shuttled in their parents’ mini-vans to organized sporting events; singing along with Barney, who reassured them how special they were; IMing each other while simultaneously listening to music, doing their homework, and playing videogames.

Of all the discussion swirling around about what the emergence of these digital natives means to the future of librarianship, I think Susan Gibbons pins it down in the most concise, compelling, and practical manner. What makes her perspective especially interesting is that she and her colleague at the University of Rochester, David Lindahl, won a grant to have a cultural anthropologist, Dr. Nancy Fried Foster, study the habits of faculty (mainly to understand how to develop the institutional repository) and then, in a later study, the habits of students. For two years, Foster observed this fascinating species in their natural habitats…skipping through their eating and mating habits (probably for the better)…to find out how they approach their academic work.

As data emerged, Gibbons found she had to toss aside some preconceptions…that students’ Xboxes, IM accounts and IPods were at best, secondary to their academic work, at worst, distractions. Instead, she concluded:

It did not take long before I realized that my preconceptions were completely wrong. iPods, cell phones, wikis, instant messenger, and online games are not ancillary to traditional academic tools, such as books, laptops, and lecture halls. Rather, these technologies had become essential to the students’ academic toolkit. Moreover, if academic libraries wanted to continue to be a vital part of the academic success of undergraduate students, we needed to embrace these technologies as well.”

While reading this manuscript, I was struck by how different these “kids” are today. When I was a college student, my folks would drop me off at the front door to my dorm, slip me $20 or $30 “for emergencies” (money immediately went to the Friday-night beer fund), and drive away. I’d talk to them from the short-corded phone affixed to the wall of my dorm room every Sunday. Nowadays, wireless “family share plans” mean that college kids talk to their parents just about every day. And, if they have a research paper to write, chances are that Mom and Dad will be consulted during the research process. (They call this parental involvement “helicopter parenting”, by the way).

I couldn’t look up cute guys on Facebook, I was lousy at multitasking, and, yes, I knew that a research paper meant a trip to the library. No Google searches of packages from Amazon for me.

This is an interesting read (you’ll be able to read it for yourself in the fall). There’s no handwringing over the eventual demise of the library in this book. Instead, Gibbons provides some cultural background, specifics of how students interact with technology, and, most important some advice on how libraries can get into the game.