Negative vibes

In one of my favorite movies, Kelly’s heroes, Donald Sutherland plays a tank commander who meets all criticism with “Don’t give me those negative vibes man!” and then goes on to do whatever he wanted without worry or second thoughts.

Yesterday I was guilty of negative vibes. I probably should not have vented on the blog, or just written whatever I thought down without publishing it. I’m unsure about whether it was a mistake, but I am open to the possibility.

What did I think would be the consequences of this rant? I’m not really sure. Maybe I needed the release of pent up frustration and maybe, in the back of my mind, I hoped it would be a bugle call to wake people up? Totally mistaken in that case. Most librarians who read the “culture of nice“-blogpost will feel attacked and unfairly critizised, one librarian has already posted a comment to that effect, and the post will probably never be the starting point of a good discussion on the problems and challenges that libraries and librarians face today. So, probably a total waste of bytes and my readers time. Sorry about that, but “it’s my blog and I’ll write what I want to“:-) Please feel free to not read on.

To engender a true culture of innovation and development we have to stop pulling each other down, I did so yesterday, and I will not do so again. I want to focus on the positive things that happens, “positive vibes” if you like, and see how many librarians of all ages embrace and try out new ways of making the library useful to the public and more fun to work with and in.

As development of library services continue we will see project failures, successes and many inbetween, but what I would really hope for was a change in the core culture of libraries/librarians where the lessons from the failures where valued as learning and more important than the successes that we really want to show off. I will start this off with admitting that yesterdays blogpost was a mistake and that I have learnt a valuable lesson on what I want to write about on this blog, and what I should keep to myself or address in a more constructive and calm mood.

Thank you for your attention, hope to see you back here later.

Thomas

Arkivert i:Blogging, criticism

Cites & Insights on Library 2.0 and “Library 2.0″

Walt Crawfors Crawford (sorry Walt!) writes the widely read and usually interesting newsletter Cites & Insights. Where he in the latest issue (PDF)(Volume 6, number 2, 2006) tries to sum up and describe Library 2.0 as a phenomenon, based on quotations from bloggers and also critique the concept and the bandwagon “Library 2.0″ as he calls it. So far it is probably the most thorough treatment of the Library 2.0 conversation that is going on in the biblioblogosphere. Although I think it is a useful piece of work I do worry that the focus is too narrow. Maybe the time for such a summing up has not come. The conversation is new. Crawford seems to have about commented on almost all posts on the Library 2.0 discussion so far. If we say that this conversation is about 6-7 months old it certainly needs a little more time before we should start to dismiss it, or even say that we know what it is. Crawford has the time and energy to discuss and comment on the choice of individual words in several blogposts. He certainly has the right, but I must admit that I got a sinking feeling in my middle section thinking about how he would dissect this blog if he ever discovered it and not focus on the central ideas and memes that might be gathered from the posts and comments in the blog. And that is my main problem with Cites & Insights this time. It does not sum things up, does not do what I most like about Cites & Insights, find the central ideas and roll them out for the reader, easily accessible and digestible. This time I think we found a lot more Cites and less Insights than usual from Walt Crawford. I look forward to the continuing discussion on Library 2.0 and how we can improve library services to the library users/patrons with the ideas and concepts that we find in the open source movement, creative commons, web 2.0 and other sources which has not been available before. And I think that in the future there will be more worthwhile Cites & Insights from Walt Crawford also on this topic.
via Panlibus

Arkivert i:criticism, Librarian 2.0, Library 2.0