Categories Leadership

41 posts

Posts about leadership concepts

This is a Call

“The time is now,” I keep telling myself. Let me tell you why. It’s been almost five years since I fell into being a teen librarian. I was working toward my MLS at Clarion University when I was approached to do some summer teen programming at the Clarion Free Library in Clarion, PA. Their proposal was simple: do stuff for teens, buy some cool books, and get them into the library. I was a one-person team tasked with pretty much creating a library for these oft-forgotten patrons. I did it, and the teens were happy, but I realized at the […]

TEDxLibrariansTO: Librarians as Thought Leaders

Over the weekend, while all my American colleagues were heading to The Big Easy for #ala11, I jumped north of the border to attend TEDxLibrarians at the University of Toronto. It was an inspiring day in a beautiful city and the speakers gave me a lot to think about on my long drive home. TEDx events are inspired by, and take their name from, the wildly popular TED conference. Local and independently run, TEDx organizers build the event around short and inspiring talks to create a TED-like atmosphere that is meaningful and thought provoking. Since TED first began sanctioning these […]

Library Management and Entropy: The Information as Management Text –A TTW Guest Post by Dr. Troy Swanson

Library management is a battle against entropy. Those of us who remember our physics know that entropy is most famously captured in the second law of thermodynamics, but it may be easiest to think of entropy as the measurement of the dissipation of energy in a system. So, if hot water and cold water are poured into a bucket, the energy from the hot water will spread to the cold water until all of the water is the same temperature. The state of organization (hot vs cold)  will dissipate into a state of high entropy (disorder). To reorganize the water, […]

New Library Leadership Blog from Ken Haycock

Don’t miss Ken Haycock’s new blog focusing on all aspects of library leadership: http://www.kenhaycock.com/kens-blog.html Here’s a bit of a recent post on “Building A Better Manager:” How do you determine what makes a great branch manager? The results would be fairly obvious, I suspect… along the lines of have a clear vision and strategy for your team, help staff with career development, be productive and results-oriented… All standard stuff. Well, Google found the same results but they took a more methodical approach. How many of us stop to actually analyze those performance reviews, feedback surveys, and nominations for manager awards? […]

Synergy 2010 Vision Video

Synergy: The Illinois Library Leadership Initiative 2010 is the statewide library community’s proactive movement to recruit and nurture future Illinois library leaders. Objectives include self-assessment; discovering and developing personal values; identifying the local, state and global environment; fostering and expanding skills and tools for personal, professiona and positional leadership; creating a cohort group; establishing mentoring relationships; and developing a vision of and beyond the field of librarianship. The Synergy 2010 Vision Team (Kerrin Riley, Anthony Auston, Kathy Lynch, Dianne Ludwig, and Deborah Shippy) produced this video and vision statement based upon the vision statements of each of the 30 Synergy […]

Introducing ILEAD U

Over the next couple months I will proudly be presenting the ILEAD U (hear I lead you) Class of 2010. ILEAD U (Illinois Libraries Explore, Apply, and Discover… not sure what the U stands for) is an ongoing program developed by the super-cool Illinois State Library funded by a grant from the Laura Bush Foundation.  Its main stated goal is “To help library staff develop leadership skills necessary to address local community needs (e.g., job creation, education) through innovative applications of participatory technology tools”  Or “create awesome librarians” (my version).  This took place over 3 3 days sessions in lovely […]

On ALA Emerging Leaders – Please Welcome TTW Contributor Justin Hoenke

Note from Michael: I’m serving as a mentor for ALA Emerging Leaders Group J this year. One of the members of this outstanding group is Justin Hoenke, who’s joining the TTW family as a contributor. This is his first post.   What does it mean to be an ALA Emerging Leader?  I’ve heard a lot of things come out of peoples’ mouths.  Some have told me that it’s just something fancy to put on my resume, others that it’s just a lot of work that will remind you of a library school project.  I’m not big on negativity, so I’ve […]

Emerging Leaders

Emerging Leaders, originally uploaded by ALA – The American Library Association. ALA emerging leaders gather for a group photo at their 4th annual workshop. Around 100 attendees are being groomed to become early ALA leaders. I’m honored to be mentoring one of the groups!