Scrawled Down On a Cocktail Napkin

I am going through old notes, long-deleted blog posts, and various weirdly-titled docs on my hard drive to generate ideas for the blog, for work, and for whatever else may come my way. I’m a habitual note-taker, so I figure I have a lot of stuff to write about if I can just extract it from my notebooks. And also read my own writing.

I’m just getting started, but I wanted to share a couple of things I scrawled down during the 2016 Computers In Libraries conference. These are both good guiding credos for this site moving forward.

1. Always communicate your value. It is not self-evident.

I had a colleague once complain to me that I shouldn’t have to justify the costs of research databases in our budget because everyone knows how important they are. But that’s not true. Every librarian knows that, but we are not everyone. We are not our users and we are not our stakeholders. We cannot assume that everyone values what we do, so we need to explain our importance in a succinct and memorable way.

2. Keep it clean and make it findable.

If there is any sort of sweeping, broad statement that we can make about our users, it is that they just want to know where they need to go to accomplish what they want to do. It is our job to make that as easy as possible. And they will expect that from us, because we communicated our value to them.
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