Reading the Headlines: Insights from 20 Minutes of Blog Skimming

I've streamlined my daily activities to some extent and now only actually READ a few blogs each day (a few being less than 10, depending on who has posted). That means when I have a slow time on the desk or a half hour set aside for "professional reading," I'm essentially skimming a couple hundred headlines and summaries, primarily from library science and technology blogs.

Today, this is what I see (I'm not saying any of this is deep or new, just that it literally JUMPS off of the screen at you after a bit):

• The digitally-induced identity crisis for libraries and librarians is deepening. Best quote (lost the source, sorry): "The librarian's new role is to help people build their own libraries." I absolutely love this idea.
• I perceive a growing divide between the blogging librarians and what I consider "the rest of the profession." Among bloggers, knowing a programming or scripting language is like music catalogers knowing at least one foreign language, but to expect or even suggest that this should be a standard for librarianship is a pretty big leap. How's your Italian? How's your PHP coding? Can you do the funny voices for storytime? Can you do all three? No? What kind of librarian are you???
• Rules are always an issue. Schools won't let kids access MySpace accounts. DRM makes videos useless. Censorship continues. Check-out times are too short. The need to focus on the service and forget about unnecessary restrictions popped out again and again.
  

So, that's the zeitgeist according to Whitney. Distilled down even further, it's obvious that these aren't new ideas at all:

• First item above: save the time of the reader.
• Second item above: respect diversity.
• Third item above: service with a smile.