CONNECT Forum Archive

We’ve all been there. It’s your last day of work before vacation and you’ve just got to get through the next eight hours before embarking on your next great adventure. You take a sip of coffee, open your email, and the next great epidemic since the Swine Flu seems to unfold right before your eyes. Your manager and half the staff have called in sick. You’re the librarian-in-charge. Then the power goes out – you can’t pull up those emergency procedures now!

Situations like these will eventually happen to us all and we’ll be called upon to serve as librarian-in-charge – it’s in our standards. It doesn’t have to be a source of stress, though! Your colleagues are here to help! Come to the CONNECT Librarian Forum and share your tactics and techniques for handling the librarian-in-charge duties while picking up new ideas from your peers.

To sweeten the deal we’ll have a hot chocolate bar with loads of fabulous toppings to stir in as well as some holiday cookies.

So, you’re coming to CONNECT, right?! Like this page or drop a comment to let us know you’re coming!

Let’s face it – the telegraph and carrier pigeon are no longer effective means of communication and professional development. And Library journals are great but the information only flows in one direction. Today’s well-informed professional librarian has dozens of websites, blogs, lists, and video channels at the fingertips. But which ones are the best for keeping up with the profession and which are the best for networking?

Yes, I know we are rapidly gaining ground on The Singularity. And yes, when the day comes that every human baby receives an upload of the sum total of Earth’s accumulated knowledge before its first diaper change, reference librarians will join lamplighters and knights in the dustbin of history. But Raymond Kurzweil doesn’t think that day will come until 2045 and besides, even Google’s founders have said, “It will be about 300 years until computers are as good as, say, your local reference library in search.”

So we’ve still got work to do, people! And despite the proliferation of online information and search engines which make it seem easy, the job of finding the right answer or the best information can be just as hard as it ever was. I like to say the needle (i.e. the best answer) is the same size but the haystack is exponentially larger.