Training

If you are getting the sense that there is a whole lot of variation in the format, content and provenance surrounding essential library staff-specific information about the Affordable Care Act, then you have read the scene accurately!  Before you throw up your metaphoric hands, reach for your mine pick and/or shovel, or take to your bed with an affordable headache, let's break this down into approachable chunks. Today we'll look at webinars:

Birds do it, bees do it, and I do it every morning. It's what brought me to the brand new Hippie Gypsy coffee shop (because I did it online last night). Richard Feynman did it on the beach (and Leland Myrick depicts that perfectly in his and Jim Ottaviani's new biography).

Overcoming challenges in the library workplace involves a mixture of creativity and fun, Suzanne Merritt suggests in her new full-day Infopeople “Building Leadership Skills: Stimulating Creativity” workshop sessions being offered in libraries throughout California from April 10-24, 2009.

Let’s acknowledge that our educational system generally does a poor job introducing us to the theory, process, and language of budgets and budgeting. Let’s further agree that this leaves many of us unprepared for our first (and second and third) experience preparing and managing budgets when we begin writing grant proposals, managing projects, or assuming our initial supervisorial-managerial position. We stare at endless rows of numbers, line items, index codes, sub-object codes, and income and expense statements.

If we step away from concerns about not seeing forests for trees and look, instead, for the hidden roots to projects like the new San Francisco Public Library (SFPL) Leadership Academy, we discover encouraging stories about leadership, patience, and how long projects can take to reach fruition.

Developing leadership skills, as San Diego County Library Training and Web Services Manager Polly Cipparrone is discovering, is a continual process with plenty of surprises and opportunities.

We don’t have to look very far to see that leadership is an issue which is much discussed and often promoted within libraries and the communities they serve—possibly because so many of us sense a leadership void in so many of the organizations and political entities we encounter.

One of the best two-for-one deals for current and prospective library leaders is Pat Wagner’s “Building Leadership Skills: Developing and Leading Projects” workshop. Part of the Infopeople Eureka!

Inspired by conversations during the California Library Association conference in San Jose earlier this week and by online coursework through the University of North Texas, I’ve been completely immersed in discussions, articles, and examples of how onsite and online reference services are developing.