These last two weeks taking concentrated classes at SU have been crazy and fun and a lot of effort. I’ve met many future librarians and some current librarians that I would be happy to see again. It still amazes me how encouraging and helpful librarians are to library students. Someday I’ll get a chance to pass on the favor.

And then there’s the digital collections to consider. Will they last like paper lasts? Digital collections may not necessarily be more durable than a book, the world has had the technology for a short span of time. What’s 30 years compared to the lifespan of a book from the 1400′s?

A few thoughts taken from the gateway class I’ve attended the past two days:

Creativity comes with a lot of tries and many failures. Note to self: punish inactivity, not failure or success (courtesy of David Sutton’s article, “The weird rules of creativity” ) I sometimes think that I, and others as well, routinely punish even the possibility or hint of failure, and that is such a barrier to personal growth and innovation. To modify what my Saturday friend Garrison Keiller says,  “the children have to be above average.” If Edison saw failure as an act of improving and making an invention better, I, and others often see it as personal. Which comes to a silly existential question, but that I’ll leave for another time…

Remember your audience. When you present a proposal or solution, ask yourself,  “What would motivate my audience (insert Director, Board of Trustees, etc here) to support this proposal?” Don’t assume that they share the same priorities. After all, their job has a different title.

Encouragement costs little and gains much.

Maybe I like teamwork after all.

Library people love talking about libraries.

I’m happy with the practicality of classes so far. Don’t get me wrong, they’ve contained plenty of theory, but have plenty of applications in real life time. For the Mondays of life, here’s looking at you, kid, cheers!

When Rubin (2008) talks about education in libraries, he points out that education, a value adopted by the ALA, is also a major reason for “continued public support of libraries” (p. 12) Periodically I meet people who think that the library is rendered obsolete by the advent of computers and the Internet. My observation, which comes from watching the microcosm of a small town public library, is that rather than rendering the library obsolete, the Internet has spawned a new need for community education. This need is for computer experience and computer learning,  or “computer literacy”, and has been seen and voiced by others in the library community. The public library’s provision of  opportunities for computer experience is an important rebuttal to thoughts that the time for libraries is past. In the last few years at my public library I have seen use of our public computers increase steadily.