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Wednesday, October 31, 2007

Information R/evolution video

This video takes on the and displays how we have gone from "everything in its place" to everything is miscellaneous" Pretty neat. > Link

Friday, October 26, 2007

FY09 budget and Special Session

The Governor has released a budget that states if the special session of the General Assembly does not approve the revenue enhancements he proposes, the state allocation to public libraries will be cut by 10%. In Allegany's case that is a $82,000 cut. I would hypothesize that the cuts to county government from the state would also lead to additional reductions in aid from the county as well.

The irony is that the State deficit was caused by the State itself (passing thornton funding without having a source ofrevenue to pay for it and the 10% income tax cut under the Glendenning Administration) but they wish to pass the pain of fixing it back to the Counties. Allegany County is proposed to get a cut of $12,000,000 in state aid under the proposed FY09 budget.

B&T Duplicate checking

It sounds like a real struggle to get B&T to understand that their duplicate checking system is not working. We are still in the trial period before we make major changes in direction (like a new vendor). I can't understand that no other library is having this trouble. My thinking going in was that B&T was large enough that we didn't have to be the leader in pushing them to improve. That we coudl be a small fish in the big pond of book vendors. Perhaps we are hitting trouble because we are not big enough to have a department that operates like the big system ones they are used to. Its like the commercial where the 2 business men (ie big firms) laugh at the mini-business man (ie small business or us) and then put an ashtray on top of the mini-dude.

Thursday, October 25, 2007

Busy Week -lots of Westernport Furniture work

Busy week, could be a hangover from the last 2 weeks of days out of office presenting at meetings. Anyway lots of progress on the Westernport Renovation. I received the interior designers work and have been making it fit in the scheme that works to get it ordered,etc etc. Take a look at the drawing for the Children's Enchanted forest story hour area.

Monday, October 15, 2007

Note Pad for the Creative Set

One of the coolest things we got at last years Learning 2006 Event was the notepad. This year they have made it available as a pdf. Hope you get a chance to try it out.

Follow the link below:

Notepad Design: Sure, you can take notes on a yellow pad. Instead, we have designed a multi-color, multi-format visual note taking pad for our participants, that is mapped to learning styles and explicit about types of notes that lead to TRANSFER. Check out this pad and sample of the Social Buttons at:

http://www.learning2007.com/buttons

Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Employee Relations

Neat Quotes/ideas from Sue Noke, Customer Service Chief at T-Mobile.

Her ideas on getting your workers to care about customers.
Listen: The folks at the front lines are the only ones to hear the customer firsthand. Listen to what they say and make changes based on their input.
Develop: Lay out clear career paths so that they can achieve their personal goals.
Educate: Give them the coaching and training they need to do their jobs
Celebrate: Define success in terms of the customer. The reward and recognize it.

Taken from Forbes, 10/1/2007 p 58

Tuesday, October 9, 2007

23 things wrap up

What a great time we had on Friday! Good food and People.
And the entertainment was outstanding!

Invisible hand vs Wisdom of Crowds

I was flipping through some book and a question hit me. Is the book Wisdom of Crowds a restatement of Adam Smith's "Invisible Hand" that guides economics and capitalism? Think about it, if the market knows best, and the market is driven by masses of people buying or not buying something, isn't that the same as Surowiecki's point that if we all vote, then the outcome is best?

Thursday, October 4, 2007

Obvious to Some

Did you know that when you create a powerpoint slide and insert a movie in/on it, that it creates a space on the page and links back to the original file?

So what? well I found this out when I tried to burn a copy of the powerpoint show to a CD to present it at a meeting. When I ran the show from the CD, no movies were present, only the black void of emptyness where the movie was supposed to be. No big, since I will bring the whole laptop to the meeting.

This difference is notable since it varies with how powerpoint handles pictures that are inserted
in/on slides. If you copy the ppt to a cd, the pictures go with it in that case.

The handling of movies in ppt seems to be designed the way web sites are designed with many threads connecting all the pieces that come together only when you display the page on the screen.