Thing 22: Staying Current

Ah, this is a tricky one: resolving to keep up this blog, to keep learning new 2.0 things, to make a commitment to keep up and use the new tools. (I should have known this would be in the fine print somewhere.) I suppose that one doesn't remember what one doesn't use. Years ago in my academic library, we had to know how to Shepardize (tracking legal citations) and how to use printed citation indexes 9oh, they were a pain in print.) You'd get questions at certain times of the year, and then it was the crash course (or, if you weren't ahead of things, an on-the-spot crash course.) Keeping your hand in with these tools was a service to patrons, but darned hard to keep up. Since this is a benefit to me, as well as my patrons, this SHOULD be a priority.

I'll try this, for now: since classes are starting next week (and bringing with them the busy season), I'll start small: I'll try to blog once a week, until the term settles down. I will try to keep track of new things I've learned, as well as "old" things I've relearned (I just reinstalled the "Save to Delicious" link that I lost when I got my new computer a few weeks ago.) I think my RSS feeds are at a manageable size, so I won't add any right now. I will get back into Facebook soon and flesh out my profile, respond to the responses I've gotten, etc. (I found several of them in the email spam filter this morning, so I'm not as negligent as it might seem.) I'll even think about setting up a schedule for checking Facebook, LinkedIn, Ning, Bloglines, etc. (I think I'm the sort of person that works best on a schedule, at least for something like this. I guess that's my way to plan on keeping up.)

I plan to be back later in the week, to finish up. Right now, I need to do some collection development.