Blogging Has Been Slow, But Nothing Else Has Been

OK, I admit. I have not really been blogging much lately. I have been really busy. Several months ago, I developed an aggressive staff training schedule for the fall/winter months. ILS training had made training other classes a lower priority, so I wanted to make up for it by offering many classes. And I also offered several new classes that would require developing.

We also decided to start placing all training material online via wiki. This is similar to re-making all of my training handouts. So offering more classes, developing several new classes, and migrating content into the MPLIC-Wiki has taken up quite a bit of time.

On top of that, Damone and I have been assisting the City of Memphis Quality of Professional Development by offering all of their technical training classes for the fall/winter. Their previous trainer did not train the classes in a way that meshed well with our style of training. This has resulted in us developing these classes from scratch.

Then, we found ourselves with many new staff to train. Thank you! But that did result in us needing to add several trainings into an already packed schedule.

Also, the new ILS and other changes have required us and the Search Strategies Training Team to re-think the whole four-day training. A large task in and of itself!

The Virtual Reference Committee has spent time expanding the chat service to branch staff. This required training of course. And the expanding role of chat and email reference (now that they are prominently displayed on our new website) has exposed some flaws in the system. This has resulted in several of us spending a lot of time trying to figure out how best to make this work.

I have also been assisting the Crime Incident Statistics Sub-Committee with the development of a database that could make the process of filling out incident forms and tracking incidents a lot easier.

At the same time, I have been gradually settling into the new role of Secretary for your Retirement Board. Trying to learn what these money managers are saying and trying to translate that into something that all of us can understand has been quite a task.

I have also been preparing for a presentation for the TLA Staff Development workshop being held here on November 16. My presentation is called "So Easy, a Librarian Can Do It: Expanding Your Web Presence Beyond Your Website".

So, if you are still reading (which I doubt), please understand that blogging has taken a back seat for the time being. The poor site needs attention, though. I haven't posted in a while. All my pictures are gone. It looks like a lonely ghost town.