Maybe I should become a speaker?

A couple weeks ago I received a call from Scholarships for Scholars about speaking at their upcoming awards ceremony. As a senior in highschool I received a college scholarship from this group. I agreed to speak at the event as a way to give thanks for the funding they provided me. This is my second speaking engagement for 2009! Maybe I should consider joining the speaker circuit!?! Who knows....I'm a little nervous about these upcoming presentations because engaging the audience with interesting stories and humor is quite a challenge for me.

I have a couple of months to come up with an engaging and inspirational 10 minute keynote for the Scholars event. Oh boy do I have my work cut out for me.

The Start-Up Librarian

I highly enjoyed the Start-Up Librarian article over at Library Journal. The author Kyle Jones, talks about how libraries should think more like start-ups when hiring and developing staff members. Jones uses examples from Google where cut down hierarchy and allow for innovation. I personally would love to see more workplaces adopt this style. Since I work in a small office I am lucky to have easy access to supervisors for quick input and decisions on projects. However, I would love to have a dedicated 20% time where I could work on outside projects like those lucky Google staffers are allowed. Perhaps as the library and information workforce transitions towards the younger generations we will see a breaking down of strict hierarchy and bureaucracy and more team oriented approaches, innovation, and a willing to experiment.

Federal Contracting

The Washington Post Fed Page had an interesting article about federal contracting where they discuss how the federal contract workforce has grown quite a lot over the years and is operates a "shadow government" workforce. As a federal contractor myself this article was very relevant. One of the trends in the federal library community is to contract out part of the library staff or the entire library itself. One of my hopes for the Obama administration is to improve the federal hiring processes and work culture and to cut down on the contracting and outsourcing. I feel that there is an unfortunate stereotype of civil service vs. contract worker. Both can be well-meaning individuals who are working hard in their chosen profession. Civil service employees are negatively sterotyped as lazy workers while contractors are viewed as overcharging the government for services and not really caring about the mission. I believe that both of these views are generally false. I personally know federal and contract workers that are very dedicated to their jobs. It just happens to be very difficult to enter into the career federal workforce at this time. It is my sincere hope that the new administration will make some lee-way to improving both the federal hiring process and contract oversight.

GPO FDSYS

I know I'm a little behind on this news but for all you gov info geeks out there the Government Printing Office has rolled out their new information management system: FDsys which stands for Federal Digital System. I plan on giving it a test drive soon.

I was pleasantly surprised to see it covered by the Post. The Fed Page gave a quick blurb here. The Post provides a longer article here where they state it is the "Google for Federal Docs." Some interesting public comments follow below...I noticed some of the commentors were FGI bloggers!

Typealyzer Fun

I ran my blog through the Typealyzer

Results follow pretty closely to my personality!

ISTJ - The Duty Fulfillers

The responsible and hardworking type. They are especially attuned to the details of life and are careful about getting the facts right. Conservative by nature they are often reluctant to take any risks whatsoever.

The Duty Fulfillers are happy to be let alone and to be able to work int heir own pace. They know what they have to do and how to do it.