HarperCollins and the ebook debacle

I'm not going to attempt to recap the ebook debacle that's been going on because of HarperCollins...Instead I'm going to point to a few great posts and then offer up my thoughts on the thing.  

• First Library Journal offers an excellent summary, and as far as I can tell the only comments directly from HarperCollins.  
• Bobbi Newman has continually updated her post to provide resources, commentary, and insights from people around the web.
• Karen Schneider makes an excellent point about the long term view of the situation.
• Toby Greenwalt offers up a letter to HarperCollins on the issue.
• The LibrarianInBlack offers up her take on the revolution that needs to come.
• And lastly (but certainly not least) Heather Braum offers up an excellent take on what reaction best serves our users.

I've seen a number of folks post that librarians, authors and readers should be outraged and make this known to the publisher.  And I agree...there's just one problem with that statement.  How many of our users understand what's going on?  How well are we communicating why these things happen with our users? 

I'm an academic librarian so my view is a bit different, but even in the academic world where we discuss budget issues and what things cost...our users still don't really understand why things work the way they do.  They get frustrated that they can't print off the entire ebook, or pages easily, or have more than one person view it at a time, or why they can't read it on the device they own.  Saying its a limit of the vendor really doesn't mean much to them.  They can't see the vendor, they don't talk to the vendor and they don't understand the discussions we have with vendors to get these rights.  All they see is us and so we take the blame.  I can only being to guess at the number of users that don't come back to us because of this.  So what do we do? 

I agree that we need to stand up to the vendors, but more than that we need to inform our users.  In terms they understand and get them behind us, to stand up with us so that we aren't fighting this battle alone.  We all need to be in this together.

Choices

More and more lately I've been thinking about how my life (and life in general) is defined by the choices that I make.  Not those huge ones that we all struggle with, those obvious life changing decisions, but the smaller ones...the ones that we don't always notice or think about at the time, but can greatly influence are lives anyway.

Like whether or not to go out and eat, because that $6 might come in handy later for something else.
Like asking the cute redhead girl whose cutting your hair what her name is
Like how you greet your colleagues that day

All such seemingly little choices, but all having such greater impact than we might initially think they do. 

I know, I know we shouldn't agonize over every small decision and I won't (nor should you)...but I'm thinking perhaps I should consider them a bit more carefully.  Perhaps it will change the direction of my day or perhaps it will lead me to something new that my library can do...or perhaps it will just make someone's day.

(and I do wish I had asked the cute redhead what her name is)

I meant to

"I meant to."  Those three simple little words, that one phrase seems to have taken up a lot of my mind this year.

"I meant to do more blogging," "I meant to call you," I meant to hang out with you," "I meant to do that project," and on and on.  I keep using it.  And you know what?  I'm tired of it.  I'm tired of saying "I meant to" and I'm tired of things getting set by the wayside for whatever reason.

My goal for next you and beyond is to stop using that phrase so much.  To stop settings things down and looking back a week later and say "well I meant to do that."  Instead I'm just going to go ahead and do them.  I'm going to finally finish some of the things I set out to do.  And I'm going to bury "I meant to" in a deep hole in the middle of the desert.

Still alive and kicking....

So it's been about 4 months since I last posted and I honestly didn't mean for it to be that long, which of course means that I have a backlog of posts to do.

So what have I been up to these past 4 months?  Well...I've been doing a bit to stay busy:

• Attended and presented at Computers in Libraries
• Attended and presented at American Library Association (ALA)
• Promoted to Assistant Professor at MPOW (no we don't have tenure as librarians, but we do go through a promotion process of sorts and have academic ranks)
• A change in job title, yes again...we dropped the "Learning Commons" from my title and I'm now just "Emerging Technologies & Services/Interlibrary Loan Librarian"
• Been working on a mobile page for MPOW and am almost ready to launch it
• Launched a text messaging service for MPOW
• Using Google Forms for a whole bunch of stuff 
• Put together a Georgia Interlibrary Loan Unconference.

And...I'm sure there were other things that will come to me later, but those are the major ones I think.  I'll be putting together posts about most of them, so hope you stick around and enjoy.