The Rat is Back!

Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa!

It absolutely can not have been almost two -- count them 2-- months since last I blogged. I have a pile of excuses nearly as high as an elephant's eye. And I'll only bore you with a few of them. First there was Thanksgiving and I had to drive over to Mequon to visit my relatives. Then I had to recover from visiting my relatives and decorate the library for the next set of holidays that were coming at us. Then the holidays arrived and I had to go visit my relatives in Mequon for Christmas Eve, drive back and then go visit the other relatives in Lake in the Hills, Illinois. Then I had to recover from those visits. And while attempting to recover from Christmas 2007 go out and buy all the deeply discounted stuff for Christmas 2008. Then there was New Year's Eve and New Years Day -- which I won't go into at all (and not because I can't remember). I had a library board meeting to get ready for on January 3rd and since then I have been walking around saying --"Doesn't it seem like January's been going on forever?". Then of course there has been all the mandatory watching of football -- particularly THE PACKERS!!!!!! Go Pack Go!!!!! Boy, have I been enjoying this season including wearing my Brett Favre jersey on game day -- to which I attribute the Packs' winning season. Some of you may recall that I am a (sandhill) crane nut. And since one of my goals is to see cranes every month of the year, this involved a road trip in December (Cranes are smart you know. When there are 35 inches of snow on the ground, they leave town and head south.) to a place about 20 miles south of Valparaiso, Indiana (where there was no snow cover in December and about 15,000 cranes). Then since we are now in January and the Indiana cranes aren't likely to hang around very far into the month, I high-tailed it south just last Thursday to look for cranes once again. We actually managed to locate about 400 of them in the rain after nearly getting my little car stuck in the greasy gravel road. But now I'm back, and only have my on-line Frontpage 2003 class assignments and the dreaded (echo, reverb) Annual Report to deal with. And, the big news from Illinois at Christmas was that I'm going to be a Great Aunt! (My niece and her husband are expecting : Hoping for a boy so they can name him after my dearly departed brother) So, how'd I do on my list of excuses? Did I convince you? Yeah, I didn't convince myself either.



So now on to Project Play, as you can see I have added a Meebo widget to this blog. I shall be IMing project staff -- who are not yet online because I started doing this in the wee small hours of the morning. I think IM is really cool. I can see how it would be really useful for providing reference services -- especially ready reference type questions when the answer is pretty obvious and easy to find. As the podcast said, the world is IMing all the time and libraries need to provide service in as many formats as possible so that as many people as possible make use of their public library. In a world that is really into instant gratification, I don't see how you can go wrong offering service via instant messaging. (Unless of course none of your staff is ever on-line so that IM isn't a real option. Then you run the risk of disappointing and frustrating those you are trying to serve -- which is worse then not offering it. So I think there needs to be a real commitment to be on-line a lot of the time if you plan on offering IM.) End of sermon.

Glad to be back!