all my library blogging

I am pretty happy with the process I’ve worked out to review and retweet items at Twitter, so I thought I’d write a blog post about it.  I’ll warn you that it may not be very useful if you follow more than a few hundred people (I follow ~180 folks at this point) or if you’re not interested in retweeting items.  Otherwise, read on to learn one way to manage your Twitter information overload.

The two tools I rely upon for my Twitter process are the Favorites feature and scheduled posting.  I use HootSuite for scheduling, but it’s not the only option out there.  (Feel free to share tips about other scheduling tweet tools in the comments.)

First, I open up my Twitter page and load more tweets until I find the last one I read.  I prefer to do this from Twitter’s web interface because they load more tweets on the same page — I hate page reloads.  Once HootSuite implements this feature (they tweeted me to let me know it was in the works, after I tweeted about it), I will probably do all my Twitter processing from there.

After I’ve found where I left off, I start reading new tweets, marking every item that interests me as a favorite.  Sometimes they are things I want to retweet, sometimes they are things I want to reply to, sometimes they are just things I want to hang onto for a while.  Whatever the reason, they all get a star.  Because tweets are short, this goes pretty quickly, and it lets me briefly drop in on Twitter several times a day to mindcast, catch up, and collect new interesting tweets without it becoming a huge timesuck.  For those of you familiar with David Allen’s Getting Things Done, this is fairly analogous to the “Collect” step in the GTD workflow process.

After a day of collecting tweets, I review them.  I read all the links that interested me and decide which ones to keep starred for later retweeting.  I un-star the ones I decide I don’t want to retweet.  I handle @replies as I come to them, posting them in real-time rather than on a schedule, and un-star them as well.  I will note that sometimes Twitter doesn’t like a lot of starring and un-starring, and sometimes stuff doesn’t get un-starred when I want it to, but it’s more a nuisance than a big problem.  Because this step requires me to read external articles, it takes more time, sometimes a couple hours if I have a lot to read and have things distracting me.  There are some similarities here to the GTD “Process” workflow step.  @Replies are “do it” items, retweets are “defer it” items, other interesting tweets are either kept starred for reference or unstarred if I decide they’re not so compelling after all.

At this point, everything left in my favorites is either something I want to hang onto for a while or something I want to retweet.  Time to schedule!  I like to schedule my retweets to occur throughout the day between the hours of 6am and 8pm (Pacific Time).  Frequency of posts depends on how many items I want to retweet; if I have ten items I might schedule them an hour apart, if I have more than that, the frequency may be more like 30-45 minutes.  I try to keep my retweets to under 20 items a day.  I also like to stagger posting times so they’re a bit random.  I think if I scheduled all my retweets for a specific time, say, 15 minutes after the hour, it would seem a lot more robotic, and I want to avoid that.  I am a real person tweeting, after all!  I’m just doing it in a way that keeps Twitter from taking over my life. =)

If I only have a handful of collected tweets, I combine the review and retweet steps, scheduling posts as I come to them.  Otherwise, for larger quantities, keeping these steps separate is definitely more efficient — after reviewing all your collected tweets, scheduling the ones you want to retweet only takes a few minutes.

When I started using this process, I was processing my retweets in the morning, but I’ve found it actually works better for me in the evening, after a day of collecting tweets.  I can set aside an hour or two to read links, scheduling retweets to happen the next day.

What I like about my process:

• I can repeat the Collect step as many times as I want before I schedule retweets.
• Collecting tweets is not a huge demand on my time, so I can do it in short bursts throughout the day.
• I like the lag that is introduced by reviewing in the evening — tweets get to live another day by scheduling them to retweet the next.
• Intentionally introducing lag also means I can take a day off from scheduling retweets without feeling like a slacker.
• Interspersing mindcasts and @replies in real time keeps me from seeming like a robot.
• I love the fact that scheduling tweets for the following morning means I’m posting on Twitter before I even get out of bed!  =D

So, how do you Twitter?  I’m particularly interested in learning how all of you people following thousands of other people manage it. =)

Greetings! To continue my informal series of posts on “finding your thing”, I’d like to talk about…

Not fixating on a single self-knowledge tool

Lots of people are familiar with the Meyers-Briggs inventory and/or the Keirsey Temperament Sorter.  I like these tools, but I worry that it’s easy to fixate on the results to the point where other aspects of your personality fall from your view, resulting in a limited view of yourself.  (This is probably true of most self-discovery tools, which is why I think it’s good to play with more than one.)  For example, I saw this in a former roommate who described himself as a “Textbook ENTP”.  I often wondered if he might be more than that.  I also saw it in myself – despite the fact that my type has changed over the years, when I started regularly testing as INTP, I began to let my type define me the way some people let their horoscopes define them.

I particularly focused on the “T” in my type, which is supposed to mean I am more of a thought-oriented person than a feelings-oriented person.  I came to think of myself as  a very rational person.  I identified with Spock and Data. When I took the Autism, Systematizing, and Empathy Quotient tests (yet even still more self-discovery tools!), my high scores on the AQ and SQ tests and rather low EQ score reinforced this belief. I suppose the “Intellection” result on my StrengthsFinder didn’t help, either.  The jury was in.  I was not ruled by my emotions. I was definitely Not An “F”.

Which is why the next self-discovery tool I’m going to talk about floored me about as much as the StrengthsFinder did.

NeuroLinguistic Programming and finding out how you process information

One of my the people from the #notstrategy call I started following on Twitter, Jason (@metanoid), tweeted a great link about processing information last week. (He also tweeted about the AQ I mentioned above.  He knows good links.)  I learned about how I process information a few years ago when I was seeing a NeuroLinguistic Programming (NLP) counselor, Raven Erling in Seattle, and it was another very important discovery about myself.  NLP is a complex topic, but one of the core concepts is that everyone has a primary Representational System – everyone tends to favor one of their senses over the others when interpreting their environment. This is what the processing information link that Jason shared is aimed at helping you discover.

I can still remember what Raven said when I told him I was a very thought-oriented person, and that I did not consider myself very emotional at all:

Raven had a shaved head when I was his client, so he actually did look sort of like that.  =)

Today, I can only assume he was trying really hard not to laugh, because he had already figured out what I hadn’t, which is that my primary modality is Kinesthetic. I understand the world through my body and my feelings before I let any of my other senses have a crack at it.  (Contrast this with being primarily Visual, or primarily Auditory.)

I was pretty shocked when Raven told me this. I didn’t want to believe it, frankly, because I believed so strongly that I was a “T”. It didn’t take me too long to come around, though. I talk with my hands. If I participate in any activity with any risk of physical discomfort, I am guaranteed to notice the physical discomfort. When shopping for clothing, I prioritize comfort over everything else. I love to do work with my hands, like knitting, or assembling IKEA furniture. I can’t not move to music, even when I’m sitting down.  You get the idea.

Raven and I spent a few sessions reconnecting myself to my body and my feelings. My focus on the “T” part of myself meant that I often didn’t even realize when I was feeling something. I was going through a rough transition period at the time, so whenever I was worked up emotionally, Raven would make me stop and check in with myself. Where is the feeling in your body? Is it hot or cold? Is it moving or stationary? is it pulsing?

What I discovered is that, despite my belief that I was thought-driven, I actually had very strong, raw emotions, I just wasn’t able to recognize when I was feeling them.  This meant they could blindside and incapacitate me, I could quickly become overwhelmed with depression or anger without understanding why.  Learning that I am a kinesthete and the NLP work that followed helped me gain more understanding about what’s happening with myself at any given moment and has helped me grow tremendously as an individual.  Not only do I recognize and have better control over my own emotions, I recognize them better in others now as well. It’s also much easier to get information the way you need it when you know how you process it best. It is not something I consciously apply to my professional life (not yet, anyway), like I do with my Input, but I do use it to describe myself.

Ironically, I later learned that my relationship with my own emotions was actually very INTP.  For INTPs, feelings are a “shadow” function that expresses itself in an extraverted and immature way.  Paul James explains some of these characteristics in his extensive INTP Profile.  So, even though I process information kinesthetically, it doesn’t mean I’m not INTP, in fact, it might even reinforce it.  I find it immensely interesting that these two tools ended up complementing each other, when initially it seemed like they were in conflict.

There are lots of books out there about NLP but I’m not going to recommend any of them because I haven’t finished any of the ones I’ve tried to read. The books by the people who created NLP, Richard Bandler and John Grinder, are mostly transcripts of live sessions and can be difficult to follow, and the rest are like Tony Robbins’ stuff (which, hey, if you like him, cool, but I am definitely not his “right people”.). Instead, if you are interested in exploring NLP, I recommend finding a certified counselor in your area and scheduling a couple sessions. If you don’t have any particular issues to discuss and just want to learn more about yourself, you may only need one. NLP has a reputation for not taking a lot of repeated effort, and even people who see NLP counselors with problems to work out tend to get them figured out in only a few weeks. NLP counseling is not something you need to keep doing, unlike a lot of other talk therapy approaches.

That’s all for today!  I’m going to try to post a brief wrap-up tomorrow, perhaps with a few more pointers to tools I know about but haven’t used much personally.  Please share your thoughts and experience in the comments.

Hello again! In this post I’m going to talk about one specific tool that helped me find my thing. Apologies in advance for the length, I did cut a few hundred words but it’s still pretty long.

The StrengthsFinder Inventory and how it changed my life

I hated my first job out of college. It was so bad, I often entertained thoughts of running my car into the median on the highway during my drive home, just to get away from it all. (Thinking about my cats kept me from doing it.)  My self esteem had been so destroyed in this job that I didn’t even feel capable of obtaining a new one.  I was truly, truly stuck.

After I had been there a few years, one of my favorite managers ever, Noel Nyman (who was actually my manager’s manager), gifted a book to his entire team called Now, Discover Your Strengths. Dumb title, but was the first tool that really helped me out of my career rut.

The basic idea is that you have the most room to grow as a person in the areas where you are strongest. Developing natural talents into personal strengths is what makes people happy and productive, and everyone would be better off if we all spent more time working on enhancing our strengths rather than shoring up our weaknesses. Accompanying the book is an online inventory that helps assess what your strengths are, choosing your top five out of a list of 34. The book’s publisher, Gallup, developed the inventory after interviewing tens of thousands of managers in hundreds of companies over a period of several decades, so it’s backed up by considerable research.

Downside note: you have to use a code printed on the inside of the book jacket to access the inventory, which means you need to buy your own copy. But, if you feel like you are at a dead end in your life and are looking to get out of it, I think it is totally worth the price. I received my copy as a gift, but I have gifted copies to several of my friends because of how useful it has been to me.

If you are already well aware of your strengths, this tool will be a waste of time, and I do know people who felt that way about it when they were required to participate in a StrengthsFinder activity at their workplaces. (I disagree with requiring people to take the inventory.) But if you are someone who has placed high priority on being a “well-rounded” individual, the results may be a revelation — they were for me. I tried to guess what the inventory would tell me before I took it and I guessed completely wrong. My top two strengths are something called “Input” and “Intellection”. My reaction was something along the lines of, “What the heck is Input?”

It turns out that people who are strong in Input have a natural talent and tendency for collecting things, especially information, because you never know when you might need it again. The truth of this was immediately apparent to me. I’ve long been someone who processes huge quantities of information on a daily basis, from my childhood as a voracious reader to the internet-addicted adult I am today. But it was never anything I had ever considered among my personal talents! No, these were qualities that made me a lazy daydreamer who surfed the internet all day, keeping me from doing my job. Despite being able to immediately reframe my newly-identified strengths as weaknesses, I was energized. Something told me that the folks at Gallup were right, and I started looking for ways to play to my strengths in my work.

For a while, I tried to use my newfound self-knowledge to make my existing job more tolerable, but I soon concluded that I really was in the wrong role, and that it was time to find a new career, one that suited me better. Prior to finding the StrengthsFinder, coming to this conclusion would have made me feel like a failure, but instead, it gave me the courage and freedom to look for something different.

I didn’t find a new career immediately — I spent a couple years pursuing Technical Writing and Editing before I found my “calling” in Library and Information Science, and it took me a couple years after that to apply to library schools. But today I am a library school graduate with a fledgling information consulting business, a dream whose seed was planted six years ago. I know I would not be here if I hadn’t encountered the StrengthsFinder.

The cool thing about StrengthsFinder is that there are so many strengths, there are millions of combinations of them and you’re unlikely to come up with the same profile as someone else. I also like that it doesn’t try to prescribe you a job. It tells you who you are, but it doesn’t tell you what you should be doing — that part is up to you.

Downsides

I don’t want this to sound like a commercial for the StrengthsFinder so here are some of the things that are not so great about it:

• As mentioned above, you have to buy the book to take the inventory
• They only tell you your top five strengths — it would be nice to see all 34 ranked
• They claim your top five will never change, so they don’t let you take it again

I have actually obtained a second code to take it again and only my top two strengths were unchanged, so I don’t believe the last item.

The StrengthsFinder is based in Strengths Psychology, which is loosely related to the field of Positive Psychology, the brainchild of Martin Seligman. Dr. Seligman discusses similar ideas in his book, Authentic Happiness, but his list of traits are less business-oriented — kindness, humor, gratitude, etc. — and he claims that you can actually develop the traits you’re weaker in, and he has examples from his own life of how he developed his own sense of gratitude. My own experience inclines me to agree and I think the StrengthsFinder would be an even better tool if Gallup acknowledged this.

I should point out that the inventory has been upgraded and the book has been revised since I took it. It’s now called StrengthsFinder 2.0, and it’s possible they’ve addressed some of the issues I raise here.

Other Resources

If you check out the StrengthsFinder and you find it useful, you may also like the book that preceded it, First, Break All the Rules. In it, they discuss how to make workplaces better by helping people play to their strengths. Noel went through this book with his three direct reports before he shared Now, Discover Your Strengths with the rest of his team. I have used the “12 questions” outlined in the first chapter to evaluate every workplace I’ve been in since I read the book.

You can also read the short review I wrote about Now, Discover Your Strengths at LibraryThing.

Have you used the StrengthsFinder?  Did you find it useful, or did it tell you what you already knew?  What strengths did it identify for you? Do they seem accurate or inaccurate? Share your experience in the comments.

Friday, I’ll talk about some more things that helped me figure out who I am.

I was in this awesome call last Wednesday with Havi and Pistachio called The Strategy of Not Being Strategic. I learned a lot about connecting with people on Twitter by being myself, and I met a lot of cool people too.

One thing that came up with several people on the call is the question of knowing what “your thing” is. There was quite a bit of chatter on Twitter about this after the call.

Havi touched on this in her post on Thursday and she’s totally right. We care about you, and your “thing” will naturally arise out of who you are.

But here’s the catch.

Some of us don’t know who we are. Actually, a lot of us don’t.

I certainly didn’t. I thought I did, until I received some gifts that opened my eyes to parts of myself I was overlooking, that I was taking for granted, and that I even considered personal weaknesses.

And — this is HUGE — it turned out that these things were the things that most make me who I am. As such, they were the key to my “thing”.

When you think about it, it shouldn’t be surprising that this happens to people. Consider– how many messages do we get in our lives that we should be striving for goals that other people have set for us? In my case, when I had lost sight of my unique personal talents, it was because I was trying to be the person I thought my parents wanted me to be. (Barbara Sher has some good exercises for untangling and analyzing the web of external demands we all experience in her book, I Could Do Anything If I Only Knew What It Was.)

Over the last six years, I think I’ve done a good job of finding my thing and pursuing it.  Since self-discovery is one of my favorite subjects ever, I thought I’d write up a post about the tools that helped me figure out who I am and what my thing is, and hopefully help others figure out how to figure it out in the process, particularly my new friends from the #notstrategy call.  

Except it turns out I had a ton to say and the first draft was way too long for a single post, so it’s going to be a few posts. This one is just a teaser, sorry. =)

In the meantime, I’d like to give others a crack at offering advice.  Has anyone reading this ever discovered part of themselves that was hiding from view? What self-discovery tools have helped you? I invite you to share your thoughts in the comments.

I updated the WordPress theme today to something even more minimal than the Hemmed theme I was using.  (This theme is “Blass2″.)  I may customize the colors a bit, but for now, this feels much better.

Blogging is going to be light until I can build up an inventory of content to sustain me for a while.  I have a list of posts I want to write, once I have a few written I am going to start posting them on a schedule.  At the moment, I am thinking I will post something original on Tuesdays and share an interesting link from my library blogroll on Thursdays.  We’ll see how that works out.  My goal is to start posting on schedule in June.

I keep meaning to blog about my experience at the AIIP conference, but I also keep getting distracted thinking about getting my business off the ground and getting small things done in that direction. In a coaching session a couple days prior to the conference, Josh had warned me that it had potential to be very defocusing, because I would be interested in all the different things people are doing, which could derail me from my goals. Interestingly, the exact opposite happened — I became more focused than ever on the idea of organizing small and personal libraries. This is the direction that Josh encouraged me to try first when we had our coaching chat, instead of pursuing research or taxonomy work first, so that may have helped me keep my focus.

It should be pointed out, though, that the nature of AIIP allows people to really carve out a niche for their talents, and some of the things people in the organization are so esoteric, they’re not likely to distract someone else from their goals.  Instead, they encourage members to hire each other to do the work they can’t do themselves, and on Friday, that is exactly what happened to me — a colleague came to me with a potential client for library collection organization services.  I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since and it’s definitely had a focusing effect as well.  I have a followup email drafted, but it needs revision before I send it.  I’m also wondering if I should wait until my business paperwork is in order.

The conference experience reminded me a great deal of my “bootcamp” experience for UIUC-GSLIS’s LEEP program in 2006, and in reflecting on that, I realized that library school actually had a very defocusing effect on me, possibly because it was hard to see the path I wanted to follow while I was there, and because so many interesting options presented themselves to me.  (For about half a semester, I even considered YA librarianship, which is so not me.)  I left school far less certain about what kind of work I wanted to do than when I started, whereas this weekend feels like it set me back on the track I first identified for myself six years ago.

Anyway, instead of writing blog posts, I have been thinking about networking opportunities, figuring out the details of setting up a small business, considering what breadth of services I am capable of offering, and figuring out how to advertise my services.  For example, I just posted my first craigslist ad for my services as an independent professional librarian.  I spent most of yesterday evening drafting it; I have a bunch of variations to keep it fresh.  I posted it under my real name because I haven’t filed any paperwork with the city yet.  At the very least, I need to file a fictitious business name before I can start doing business under my chosen business name.  I am planning to get that done before the end of the week.  There is a free class at the local Small Business Administration Small Business Development Center tomorrow; I might attend that and try to take care of some of my start-up paperwork afterwards.

While I was reviewing other craigslist ads to help me write my own, I found a professional organizer here in the Bay Area whose services seem like they could be a real complement to mine. I need to find a non-craigslist way to contact her about her business and the possibility of a referral and/or mentoring relationship. I found her on LinkedIn — I might try to connect there — and she has a series of videos on Expert Village — one of which includes a discussion of salary, and which reminded me of the value of the services I am planning to provide.  I’m hoping she’ll be willing to share tips on how to safely and responsibly provide services to people in their homes.

I also started thinking about what sorts of other businesses would complement my own, so that I can network further, and where else I can do advertising.  In addition to professional organizers, I can think of book appraisers,  booksellers, and possibly even furniture stores.  There are also some local business organizations I should consider joining, like the Mission Merchants Association and the San Francisco Locally Owned Merchants Alliance (SFLOMA), that may help build a network for marketing my services (lots of booksellers belong to that one, for example).  As for advertising, I need to figure out how one gets an ad into the Cole Hardware newsletter, and I am considering the feasibility of writing a letter and dropping it into mailslots around the neighborhood, like a TV location manager recently did in the neighborhood to scout for filming locations.

This is all so nutty.  I would never have been able to even consider doing this kind of networking before the AIIP conference, much less be excited about getting started on it.  It’s like a networking switch got flipped in my brain, and the idea of contacting strangers for networking and referral opportunities feels like no big deal now.  Hopefully my next post will start to explain exactly how that happened.

My mind has been flooded with new ways to refer to myself, too, some that I like a lot better than “freelance librarian”.  I used “Independent Professional Librarian” in my craigslist ad, and I’m also mulling over “Personal Library Designer”, but I guess that one could limit my eventual work with nonprofits and small businesses.  My favorite, however, is “Old-school Information Architect”.  I think I am going to save the “fighter of entropy and finder of things” (currently on my business card) for whenever I branch out into research and taxonomy (which, incidentally, I decided this afternoon will probably happen under a different business name).

I really feel like this is all coming together.  Last night, I realized that I could potentially have clients that need help acquiring bookcase systems and that by offering services to help with that, I could possibly get paid to assemble flat-pack furniture, which is one of my favorite things to do, ever.  For years, my friend Mike and I have discussed posting our funiture assembly services on craigslist to channel our enthusiasm for it into some extra cash, but I think neither one of us knew how much to charge for it, or whether we really had the time to take it on. I don’t know why I didn’t realize I could offer it as part of my personal suite of library design services sooner.  It was like discovering my life’s purpose all over again — I was like, not only do I get to do a bunch of library science stuff that I love, I get to do that, too? –  and I feel vindicated that I’m back on the right path.

I’ve read some lovely posts for Ada Lovelace Day on my friends’ blogs today and I  have been inspired me to write my own.  Unable to settle on one subject, I’ve decided to write about three women in technology who have affected me personally.

Anne Thompson

Anne, or Mrs. Thompson as I referred to her, taught my 10th Grade Accelerated Geometry and 12th Grade Calculus classes at Washington High School in Sioux Falls, SD.  She has an infectious enthusiasm for math and she was a very strong proponent of integrating graphing calculators into the math curriculum, something that had a huge impact on my own math education.

My family moved from Indiana to South Dakota in December of my eighth grade year, right in the middle of Algebra II.  The school districts used different textbooks, which addressed topics in a different order, so I wasn’t quite prepared for where the class at my new school was at in their textbook, and I fell behind, which messed me up in math classes for years.  A graphing calculator exercise in the first chapter of my graphing-calculator-based Calculus textbook allowed me to break through many of the barriers I’d had with Algebra in a single stroke of insight.  It was also the first platform that I enthusiastically programmed on.  The instant visual feedback of being able to graph a function immediately is an extremely powerful teaching tool and I thank Anne Thompson for working so hard to bring this technology into her classroom and into the classrooms of her fellow teachers.  I believe the school owned well over 100 TI-81 calculators by the time I graduated in 1994.  I still have my TI-85 around here somewhere.

It appears Anne is teaching classes at South Dakota State University these days.

Toni Logar

Dr. Logar is a Professor in the Math and Computer Science department at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology.  I’ve always admired her for the fact that she has a mess of degrees, and for being one of the clearest programming teachers I’ve ever had.  She was always willing to help when needed and was always looking out for students’ best interests.  I was delighted when she agreed to write me a recommendation for my application to library school.

• Dr. Logar’s author profile page at the ACM Digital Library
• Google Scholar author search for AM Logar

Janie

I haven’t spoken to Janie in years, but I suspect she values her online privacy, so I won’t be referring to her last name here.

Janie was the systems integration lead on the team at Rockwell-Collins where I did a co-op for eight months in 1997.  She was also one of my officemates.  Janie is one of the smartest people I have ever met, and I don’t feel that she ever got enough credit for it.  I remember her as both an excellent natural engineer and an excellent natural tester.

My favorite example of her raw engineering prowess is that she had designed a cruise control for her car that worked on mechanical principles — it would simply hold the accelerator pedal in the spot needed to maintain speed on the freeway, and she could easily engage and disengage it with her foot.  Once, she got a speeding ticket driving through Nebraska, which puzzled her until she realized that she’d last filled her gas tank with a 10% ethanol mix.  She concluded that it made her car go faster at the position the pedal was being held in by her cruise control mechanism.

Janie also gave me my first exposure to good edge test cases.  Our team worked on Flight Management Systems (FMS), which are the avionics systems that fly planes when they are up in the air, keeping track of the flight plan and instruments and such.  The project I worked on was a software simulation of the computer hardware the FMS ran on, and Janie would use the simulator to program the FMS to follow crazy flight plans, like a series of waypoints along a spiral, or going endlessly back and forth between two waypoints.  She’d find good bugs, too.  I thought of her often during my career as a software tester.  She would have been a great Microsoft hire.

I often think about getting in touch with her again.  I hope she is well.  I know she still lives in the same house in Cedar Rapids, which I believe managed to avoid the bad flooding there last summer.

The Ada Programming Language

Not exaclty a “woman in technology”, I know, but I had to learn how to program in Ada when I worked at Rockwell-Collins on a co-op, and I have to say that it is one of my favorite programming languages.  I came to love it for it’s refusal to compile until the code is mostly correct (as opposed to C/C++ compilers, which will try to compile whatever you throw at it) and the fact that it flows in such a way as to need very little commenting to document it. I would like to program in it again someday.

Other Ada Lovelace Day posts I enjoyed:

• Jonathan Rockhind
• Jodi Schneider

I just finished making arrangements to attend the 23rd annual conference of the AIIP next week. I am really excited about this.

I joined AIIP last week. If I had known that doing so would get me a letter from Mary Ellen Bates, I would have joined a long time ago. I first discovered her in 2003 — before I had even heard of library school — and her work has been an inspiration to me ever since. Now, granted, it is really a letter marketing her business coaching services, but it is written in such a warm and unassuming manner, I don’t feel marketed to at all. Instead, I feel like I just got a response to a fan letter. This woman has serious skills.