Library Leadership Network
wcrawford | July 17, 2009More of you attended this year's ALA Annual Conference than ever before.
If the programs I attended (and I attended more programs than usual) and the crowds I saw in exhibits are any indication, you were active at the conference, not just there for the sunshine. (Yes, "active" includes schmoozing; seeing e-acquaintances from all around the country face-to-face is certainly one big reason I've been attending ALA for the last 34 years...)
So here's a challenge for y'all:
What lessons related to leadership (or other topics covered on the Library Leadership Network) did you learn in Chicago?…
wcrawford | July 6, 2009Say what?
I don't believe the three words are directly related--but they all play into changes in articles in the Library Leadership Network over the past week.
It's been one of those weeks where everything's a change in existing pages articles than brand-new articles. Sometimes that's a tough decision, sometimes not. Last week, it was a split decision: One major commentary from a blog, and a smaller related commentary from a different blog, started out as a new article--until I realized, the same day, that they worked better as part of an existing article.
Anyway...
Hemispheres
Much of…
wcrawford | June 30, 2009Here's another little post about the Library Leadership Network (LLN)--naturally suggesting that you might want to go look, but also thinking about how it develops and some of the recent content.
Some weeks, most new content goes into existing articles. Some weeks--this past one, for exmaple--most goes into new articles. And some weeks (also including this past one), a new article emerges from pieces of old ones.
For the record, the new articles for the week ("week" being last Monday-Friday, June 22-26, 2009):
Advocacy and marketing begins with thoughtful commentaries on advocacy from Leigh…
wcrawford | June 22, 2009When the Library Leadership Network began, it was mostly about management--and much of the management literature uses terms leadership and management interchangeably.
Over time, I've tried to distinguish the two. The standard shorthand for that distinction is, I think, a bit too simple:
Managers get things done right. Leaders find the right things to do.
Another simple distinction is that managers have subordinates, while leaders have (willing) followers. If you have subordinates who wouldn't willingly follow you, you may be a manager but you're not a leader--and you can be a leader without…
wcrawford | June 15, 2009It would be nice to say that the Library Leadership Network grows through advance planning and scheduled changes. It would also be nonsense.
Sure, there's an overall plan (of sorts), but weekly changes tend to be opportunistic--articles grow and change depending on what I encounter and what's suggested to me.
Many LLN articles are composites, series of smaller commentaries on an overall topic. Sometimes I add overviews to those composites or rewrite them as more synthetic (synthesized?) pieces; frequently I don't.
A couple of examples from changes over the past week (for the full set of…
wcrawford | June 8, 2009A bit of background for those new to Walt at Random
The Library Leadership Network (LLN) is "a platform designed to help library leaders (and those who will become leaders) communicate, coordinate, find resources and share information." It's a service of Lyrasis, a large library network formed from the merger of two regional library networks, PALINET and SOLINET.
While LLN primarily targets library leaders, most of what's there can be useful for leaders of all sorts--and "leader" for LLN isn't just a synonym for "manager." Anyone can read LLN content (it's free), and several hundred people…