Make a New Plan, Stan: More Ways to lose Your Techie Folks

A few folks have added their lists to the “Ten Ways to Lose Your Techie Librarians”:

Karen: http://freerangelibrarian.com/2006/03/how_to_lose_your_tech_people.php

Jessamyn: http://www.librarian.net/stax/1681

Librarian in Black: http://librarianinblack.typepad.com/librarianinblack/2006/03/ten_ways_to_los.html

Caveat Lector: http://cavlec.yarinareth.net/archives/2006/03/12/fifty-ways-to-lose-your-techies/ (I love the bit about job descriptions being crammed full of every tech thing imaginable!

And this wonderfully positive spin by Scott at http://www.rcpl.info/services/liblog.html, who commented on the original post. I’m putting them up top because they are really good!

TOP 10 WAYS TO KEEP YOUR TECHIE LIBRARIANS:

1) Treat technology as being as important to your library as circulating books or having storytimes.
2) Try to have a “techie” on as many library teams as possible – they may see ways to leverage projects further with a little bit of “techno-juice” 🙂
3) Enable your techie librarians to attend tech conferences, not just library ones.
4) Give your techies time to “play” with new techologies – most libraries probably can’t afford the 20% of time that Google allows their engineers, but with a small investment you’ll likely see big results.
5) Encourage your organization to understand that big improvements are worth rolling out even if they aren’t (yet) perfect.
6) Realize that training expenses for technology staff are likely going to be higher than for others, and occur more often. Realize too that they will likely pay for themselves.
7) To echo Sarah Houghton, if the local job market decrees that IT workers are paid more than librarians, be prepared to match those salaries.
8) If you need to bring in outside help for large initiatives, please be sure that your techies are involved every step of the way.
9) Give them the tools they need to get their jobs done.
10) And, maybe even above all else, create an atmosphere where they can have fun.