Bullet Point : “We live in Shakespearean Times” is an older post on Virtual Dave… Real Blog aimed squarely at librarians, but I think it may apply even more to support staff, as we are in even less of a position to add our voices to policy or to add our ideas to projects.
Read the post, watch the Kenneth Branagh video clip, and think about what options exist for you when you have ideas and energy to contribute. If you cannot express yourself in your workplace, find an outlet for your productivity.
Some options:
- Getting together with coworkers and colleagues to brainstorm and network – you never know what could come of this sort of collaboration.
- Offer your services to libraries that might want to do more, but don’t have the resources – small public, church, and organization libraries are often a few steps behind where they would like to be.
- Do it yourself – depending on what you have in mind, you can simply apply it to your own personal situation. Even if you only set up a prototype, you will then have that knowledge and experience in your “toolkit”, and you can never predict when or how this will benefit you (and others) in the future.
It is amazing what even a single individual can accomplish… you simply need to provide the time and attitude to make it happen.
found via a FaceBook post by Buffy Gunter Hamilton
I found myself writing this a while ago:
“Seth Godin, in a blog post 9 Jan. 2010, ‘The future of the library’, suggests libraries should ‘train people to take intellectual initiative’. If society is moving from a past age in which information moved fairly slowly and taking the intellectual initiative not easily done, to one where technology developments have happily bestowed on our civilisation a glut of information, then asking to redesign society following technological change is not so far fetched.”
I think organisations have to redesign as well, including libraries, especially libraries! Even support staff can maybe be expected to take the intellectual intitiative nowadays. Organisations will have to redesign to reflect this. Libraries could begin to expect their staff to take the initiative.