Lessons Learned

One of the best parts of being a librarian is that the job is conducive to learning. I am constantly learning new things and stretching my abilities. Here are a few things I've learned recently, and a few things I want to learn, too.

First, Awful Library Books, my other blog with Mary Kelly, was recently upgraded. We moved from a free WordPress.com platform to a hosting service called iPage. We purchased a new domain (the .net version of awfullibrarybooks). I learned how to make a forwarding redirect so that we could continue to use awfullibrarybooks.info, but have it take people directly to awfullibrarybooks.net instead of the original awfullibrarybooks.wordpress.com. That was actually fairly easy, except that awfullibrarybooks.info was purchased from GoDaddy and we wanted to move it to iPage to manage both domains from one service. I'm actually still working on that. The site upgrade also taught me just a little bit about CSS (now I want to learn more) and a lot about downloading, installing, and tweaking WordPress themes. We're still using the WordPress blogging platform in iPage. The other big lesson was about ad sales. I learned how to integrate code from the ad sales company onto the site so that the actual ads would run.

Second, I've become more of a Twitter user. You can find me at www.twitter.com/hhibner. The trick to making Twitter a useful tool is to find interesting people to follow. There are a great many really insightful librarians out there that have tweeted articles, web sites, tips, and advice that I have found really useful. Here's an article to help you find good people to follow on Twitter. My next goal will be to start tweeting more myself and finding interesting things to tweet about!

I also want to learn more about:
CSS
RSS
flying airplanes (My husband is a pilot. I just want to be able to land the thing in an emergency.)
brewing beer (not just drinking and appreciating it.)

...and the big one is library governance. At this point in my career, I don't know much about millages, bond issues, levies, Headlee, or any other tax or law-related library stuff. I would like to be able to explain to patrons how these things work, and I feel really ignorant that I only have a very basic knowledge of any of it. Since I just finished my first year as a public library department head in a larger library than my previous position, I think I will make this a goal for my second year.

Other than that, I'm still reading mysteries, still lusting after new technologies, and still on a quest to inventory every last item in the library.