Paul Signorelli's blog

Denver’s Central Library this morning delivered the ultimate example of great customer service as the American Library Association (ALA) 2009 Midwinter Conference was nearing its conclusion: a newborn girl.

For those of us who have attended many Infopeople training sessions, the simple question “How do you train staff?” was guaranteed to grab our attention during a session at the American Library Association (ALA) 2009 Midwinter Conference here in Denver this morning. And when the topic under discussion—the newly opened Knowledge Commons facility in the J.

It wasn’t all that long ago that Infopeople instructors helped introduce many of us to Web 2.0. Our colleagues at OCLC this afternoon upped the ante by hosting “From Linking to Thinking: How We’ll Live When Information Surrounds Us” at the American Library Association (ALA) 2009 Midwinter Conference here in Denver.

The title and idea behind Gail Griffith’s current Infopeople workshop—“Community Engagement”—came to mind again less than a few hours after I arrived here in Denver this afternoon to attend the American Library Association (ALA) 2009 Midwinter Conference.

The challenge, when you love everything you promote, is to draw attention to something which stands out above all the other great offerings. One of those “special children” for those of us working with Infopeople is Cheryl Gould’s latest offering, “Fully Engaged Customer Service,” so Infopeople is offering it at a 50 percent discount to any library willing to book a contract offering at $1,000 per day.

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.