“Manage as you would like to be managed”

- This is “the Golden Rule of Management,” [*] according to an article in Information Management Journal. In a swift survey of the literature, the authors identify six classes of bad managers:

The Incompetent

The Bully

The Crook

The Know-It-All

The Dodger

The Walking Policy Manual [*]

They argue that the impact of bad management is keenly felt, impacting on businesses as well as personnel:

As we enter the information age in the workplace, many employees add value simply because of what they know. They are usually referred to as knowledge workers, and how these employees are managed is seen as a major factor in determining which firm will be successful in the future

Real Glasgow Cultyer

As usual, my day has been brightened by the post on Glasgow Daily Photo - this time the statue erected in tribute to Lobey Dosser, a real piece of our heritage.

Hair 2.0

Glad to find out that my hair, neglected and unshorn as it is from time to time (I never seem to make that hairdresser’s appointment early enough), is pretty much 2.0 all the way. Having just had it cut before starting in my new office, I’ve gone from second from left on the bottom row of the seminal Infonatives Librarian 1.0 / 2.0 Hair / Shoe Opinion Survey to something close to top right. Phew! Can rest easy in my bed knowing that …

See how your own hair and shoes rate here.

Search Optimization to Prevent Suicide?

One of the big stories in search this week came from an unlikely source - the BMJ:

Despite recent controversy, no one knows how easy it is to find sites relating to suicide on the internet and what sort of information they contain. Recent studies of internet search behaviour suggest that most people use search engines, that queries are broad—mostly composed of a few words and rarely including Boolean operators or phrase searches, and that users rarely look beyond the first page of results. [1]

Authors of a study at the University of Bristol searched the Internet to study the sort of results a ‘typical searcher’ might find:

Fifteen Things

My new job is entirely webby, so I don’t have to deal with ad hoc enquiries any more, and, although that was not a principle motivator in accepting the job, it is proving to be a major side benefit. This post from Infonatives sums up fifteen reasons why.

These ones, I still need - possibly more so as a newbie backroom type:

2. How to remove paper jams

9. How to explain things without using library jargon

10. The value of a smile [*]

Ref

[*] ‘Fifteen things you need to know as an academic help-desk librarian’. Infonatives, 7 April 2008.

NCVO Presentations Online

Thanks to James Mullen (aka The Running Librarian) for pointing out that the presentations from the NCVO Publishers Forum conference (including mine) are now online as pdf. Now I can blog my conference notes with proper webby references. (Later - lunch is calling).

Conferences Stating the Bleeding Obvious?

In another stunning post this week, Annoyed Librarian shares this gem:

A couple of years ago I got frustrated with the mess the ALA Council sometimes is, so I searched Google for “blog,” found Blogger, typed a few keystrokes, and the AL was born. With some good librarian guidance from the bloggers that be, I could have saved myself a lot of time. For example, I could have gone straight to Blogger instead of through Google, thus saving myself 0.12 seconds. Otherwise, it ain’t that hard. Even I have a blog, and according to some of my critics, in addition to being a warmongering fascist, I’m also a luddite and a technophobe. [*]

I’ve been lucky enough to speak at a range of conferences on 2.0 - from local Cilip meetings and the NCVO conference through to Internet Librarian International and Online. I start most presentations by stating that I feel a bit of a fraud, in some ways, since I would never have been part of the audience I’m addressing - I would never have thought “there’s this new trend going on - how can I incorporate it in my library?” It’s just not how my brain works.

Information Monkey II

five may have been showing Battle for the Planet of the Apes this afternoon, but I have been more captivated by further shots of Angela Hunter’s Information Monkey in Dundee:

On the artist’s website

On flickr, showing the full phrase “In ma fair toon” (please note copyright statement “all rights reserved” - unlike the Big Art Mob photo, this is not commons)

“The Director’s Cut” - “One of the photo mock-ups I did for Angela when we were trying to decide what combination of letters to use” (again, note copyright statement - all rights reserved).

“Monkey business” - profile shot on flickr. (copyright “all rights reserved”)

“Monkey & Dan” - Desperate Dan in the background. Now I know where in Dundee it is. (”All rights reserved”)

Thanks to Brunton H for posting a picture of Kelburn Castle (one of the big houses near my hometown) on Big Art Mob, and then linking to further photos taken during a stone carving symposium there … which led me to his wonderful flickr set of “Our Own Art” (including these shots of the Information Monkey). Truly beautiful things - both abstract and animal.

“Apparently Personal”

I love this phrase “apparently personal” used by Sharon Olds to describe her poems in an interview in the latest Poetry Review [*]:

When the term confessional is used, I think what people mean is apparently personal poetry. When M.L. Rosenthal conjured up the term ‘confessional’ he felt that Lowell’s conversion to Catholicism and subsequent access to Confession was somehow behind Lowell’s own apparently personal poetry. We could also mention W.D. Snodgrass here, Sexton, Plath, Berryman. Of course, I can see why people would assume that my work is directly autobiographical. But I have never discussed it as autobiography.[*]

She also discusses a feeling of limitation about the way she works consistently in the first person:

The Two Fridas

I must have been 6 years old when I experienced intensely an imaginary friendship with a little girl more or less the same age as me. On the glass window of what at that time was my room … I breathed vapor onto one of the first panes. I let out a breath and with a finger I drew a “door” … I went out in my imagination, through this “door.” I crossed the whole plain … until I arrived at the dairy called “Pinzon” … I entered by the “O” … and I went down in great haste into the interior of the earth, where “my imaginary friend” was always waiting for me. I do not remember her image or her color. But I do know that she was gay - she laughed a lot. Without sounds. She was agile and she danced as if she weighed nothing at all. I followed her in all her movements and while she danced I told her my secret problems. Which ones? I do not remember … When I returned to the window I entered through the same door drawn on the glass pane … I was happy. I blurred the “door” with my hand and it “disappeared.”

Frida Kahlo. Diary [entry on the origins of the double portrait The Two Fridas], quoted in Hayden Herrera. Frida: a biorgraphy of Frida Kahlo. Bloomsbury, 2003: 14-15.