Tag Archives: manager

Simply glad it’s Friday

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I am simply glad it’s Friday. This week has been stressful and draining. I have been reminded of many good things including the fact that God is in control of all things no matter how bad circumstances may be.

Earlier this week in the late afternoon I went to the cafeteria at work to buy a cookie because I had very little for lunch. My manager noticed this and as I walked past him I held up the cookie and told him I needed it to sweeten my sour disposition. His immediate reply was, “You need a bigger cookie!” That was pretty funny.

Zotero on steroids

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I’m a big Zotero fan.  Anyone who has access to the Firefox web browser and needs or wants to keep track of bibliographies, websites, and other material used for research should use it instead of the bloated, overly expensive, difficult to use commercial citation managers such as Reference Manager, RefWorks, ProCite, and the like.  Zotero does everything you need and more, and does it better than the competition.  Did I mention it’s free?!

Today in the Chronicle of Higher Education there is an article (it’s freely available, you don’t need a subscription to access it) about a proposal made by the creators of Zotero to put it on steroids.  Put simply, they intend to make Zotero the tool of choice for researchers, scientists, professors, and others to load their research works into a shared database hosted by the Internet Archive.  The article notes the general failure (oh wait, I mean, lack of success) that libraries have had with doing this on an institution-by-institution basis using tools such as DSpace.  There is a scathing review about so-called institutional repositories and their use by libraries by one of the people I’d deem to be a foremost expert on utilizing DSpace, Dorothea Salo. It is well worth reading.

Anyway, I think this whole idea — actually, it’s more than that because the Mellon Foundation just dished out hundreds of thousands of dollars to make it a reality — has many beneficial implications and I hope Dan Cohen and his team at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University have all the success they hope for with it.  (Thanks to Wally Grotophorst for the mention.)

Sunday morning at home

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Michele isn’t feeling well this a.m. so we won’t be going to church.  Keegan stayed overnight at a friend’s house to work on a big school project, so things around here are a bit more quiet than usual.  Today is my beautiful wife’s birthday! so that makes it an extra special day.

I’ve been watching a lot of football lately.  Keegan’s team plays every Friday night and sometimes on Saturday morning as well.  Unfortunately his team lost for the first time this past Friday, to Vernon Hills.  On Saturday his team played Vernon Hills again, and lost again, but it was great to watch the game because Keegan got to play for awhile and he got in at least one good tackle.  (The position he plays is defensive tackle.)  Yesterday afternoon while Michele and Brinley went to get groceries, I watched quite a bit of college football while Tristan and Cohen built a fort and played with knight costumes.  Those who know me well would understand how unusual it is for me to be watching football!  But you know what? I’m kinda getting into it.  I was thrilled that Illinois beat Penn State, but disappointed that Michigan State didn’t beat Wisconsin.

In other news, a good friend of mine lost her job Friday due at least in part to blogging at work.  She was apparently accused of writing negative things about her job and her co-workers, neither of which is true.  It really makes me wonder about the whole blogging at work thing.  Personally I do not have a problem with this at all, viewing it as something akin to using the telephone sometimes for a personal call, or writing a personal email while at work.  Of course, there is always the possibility for abuse, but then, there always has been.  By that I mean, the introduction of Internet access, blogs, or any other computer-related technology provided to staff did not usher in a new era of possibility for abuse or performance issues.  Think of the telephone.  Persons can abuse their telephone privileges as much or more than their Internet privileges, and the telephone predates computers and Internet access by a long shot.  What I’m trying to say is that there isn’t really anything new here, first of all; and second of all, abuse of work equipment — whether it is the telephone, the copier, or the company’s Internet access — is a performance issue.  If staff members aren’t getting work done in a reasonable amount of time, then their manager needs to look at how they are spending their time, including time spent talking on the telephone for personal reasons, or time spent browsing on the Internet, or time spent posting to a blog or commenting on other blogs.  And it is important to state that how they are spending their time in these ways is only part of the overall picture the manager needs to understand in order to figure out why staff members are not productive.  Put another way (and setting aside potential for really negative things, things that other staff might deem offensive), if my staff are getting their work done in a timely fashion or even ahead of schedule, I have no problem with them spending some work time doing personal stuff.  Folks, this is just common sense management practice.

It really galls me that so many corporations think they can truly control every aspect of what their employees do during a work day, particularly when it comes to computer and Internet use.  It galls me because as I’ve already tried to point out, this is a local, individual management issue.  But it galls me even more because work environments will never succeed in shutting down or blocking personal activity.  And I think it is extremely COUNTER productive for them to even try to do so.  This is particularly the case in this time of instant messaging, personal cell phones, email, blogs, and more.  I fully understand and support monitoring of personal activity when it becomes a performance issue, and the potential need for reprimands or other strictures for the few cases where this privilege is abused.  But even then, there needs to be a step by step process whereby a warning is issued and the staff member is given an opportunity to improve, followed by progressively stronger measures culminating, finally, with termination.

I don’t know the whole detail of my friend’s situation but I do know that her employer made claims about what she was doing and writing that were simply false, and it seems as if her dismissal came without prior warning.  This is the sign of extremely poor management.

LibraryThing and cataloging nirvana, er, FRBR

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I’ve mentioned LibraryThing several times already, but I have to write about it again, this time, because of its groundbreaking and chaotic foray into cataloging nirvana, er, FRBR. Basically Tim Spalding has set LibraryThingers (LibraryThingamabobbers?) loose on figuring out what a “work” is and combining multiple versions of a work together into a “work” view in a way similar to what FRBR describes. David Bigwood of Catalogablog has already discussed this here as have Sarah Houghton of The Librarian in Black and William Denton of The FRBR Blog (see list of links here).

After working with this capability for a while, I think it is definitely a huge, big deal. As Tim writes, the intent of providing this capability in LibraryThing is social and socio-statistical (see the link to the comment from him for more explanation). And it is user controlled. Those aspects may seem like no big deal but in reality, they represent something completely different from what catalogers have attempted to do for decades in a largely self-contained, controlled environment. Just take a look at the discussions among LibraryThingers via the LibraryThing blog or the Google Group devoted to discussing LibraryThing to get some idea of how this capability is playing out. Like I stated earlier, it is not just cool and useful, it is chaotic by its very nature.

I’ve spent several hours lately, trying to pull together disparate bibliographic entries in LibraryThing using this new capability. I’ve only done some authors and left others alone. I’ve made a few mistakes but by and large, I think I’ve managed to contribute some useful work. Authors I’ve worked on include Herge (author of the Tintin series), P.D. James, and Frank Peretti.

It is a bit strange, as a former cataloging manager and serials cataloger in a large academic library, to be doing this. But it’s gratifying, too, and in many ways, that’s the point.
I think we are only just beginning to understand the ramifications of this kind of user-level, user-controlled interaction with bibliographic data (and data that is not necessarily or purely MARC-based). Some of the issues that have already arisen include whether or not to combine all language editions of a work together, authority control, how to handle editors vs. authors, and so on. All of these things have solutions or at least have been discussed for forever among professional catalogers and it is quite interesting to see how the discussion is going among a group that is largely made up of “self-proclaimed” catalogers. As Tim calls it, “Everyone’s a librarian.” Interesting stuff.