Re: professionalism, it’s like the SOS Band sang “Take your time (do it right).”

It’s a good post–thought-provoking–and I was especially amused by this sentence: “Regular library patrons treat the incompetents at their local libraries like strange relatives; they love the library and can accept its peccadilloes.”

I think what you’re referring to is customer service, and professionalism. You know, yesterday at my cello lesson my teacher was trying to impress upon me that my bow hold needs to be right and it needs to be right every time. There was an epiphany for me, though not just about cello, and I said, “Oh, so that’s something about being a professional–-you have to be ever unwilling to accept anything less than exactly right.” And then my teacher told me about a famous cellist who once told him, “One day you just have to decide that you’re not going to make any mistakes, and you don’t.” My teacher and I talked for some moments, his finally saying: “You always have more time than you think [to correct yourself, to get it right],” which I think is another lesson that the librarians that you interviewed should learn.

Strides, though still relatively small ones, are being made into semantic search (actually I’m going to a session today about “Emerging Search Technologies” at the California Library Association conference, so I’ll see about that. Other than that, strictly human analysis on a general level was attempted by including Dublic Core metadata standards for websites, but few people outside of the information fields really used them so they have fallen out of sight (hence out of mind).

Not sure what will happen in the future, though I’m not one of those people who fears information overload. I think overload is largely a function of bad information architecture.

In any case, thanks for the comment. Let me air out a few thoughts sort-of related to your response, I hope.

I will have my 4th speech in a month or two, and like you have had it bouncing around in my mind for a while now, but when I sit down to come up with something more concrete, I struggle with it and end up giving up after little progress.

I definitely won’t put it off as long as you did though, mostly because I don’t feel confident going up there without all that much preparation. One more thing to work on I guess, and Table Topics seem to help in this area quite a bit.

I’ve also noticed that, by going out of my comfort zone and Toastmasters and learning to be more comfortable there, I also gain confidence and poise in other aspects of life. I’m extremely glad I joined, and also really glad that you’ve shared your experiences in such detail. :D

Have a good weekend!