More Things - Nbr 34 - Invited authors

Jumping ahead.

I invited my daughter, and a friend who maintains a professional blog, to publish on my WordPress blog. No takers yet.

Moments ago, I invited two library professionals to collaborate with me on this blog. One is Amy in Gilbert, the other, Cheryl at Hibbing. Not many participants in More Things are providing direct email addresses, which is the only way I can see to invite authors to post on Blogger.

Has this kind of collaboration been done already in the first 23 Things?

Cheryl's post on Number 34 struck a chord with me. My response needs more than a comment. It goes way back to 1964 when I was a Student Aide at Hayden Heights Branch Library in St. Paul. One day, a very experienced reference librarian sitting in the back office, overheard me answer a customer's question directly. I knew the answer, and where to find it. Mrs. Powderly was very upset with me for not letting her do her job, but thankfully her wrath was not heard by the public.

Fast forward to the 1980's, and I had developed about 200 programs to analyze 3M International customer service performance to over 50 of its subsidiaries. It was a complicated reference tool that only I could run. I designed the database, and collaborated with IT professionals to do it. I was crossing professional boundaries to provide a valuable service. By 1990, we had developed an online menu-driven application, where anyone could gather their own statistics, or use my canned reports. I'm enjoying many of those experiences for my own purposes on the web.

So, where is the boundary between professionals here? I'm the invited participant, but until this post, you had no idea that I have reference skills and experience.

Organizing and Following More Things

I'm impressed! It took me an hour to click on each NCLC blog, and list myself as a follower of anyone who had posted on More Things in the past month. Some bloggers are really active. Everyone but me is a librarian; I'm married to one.

I had more password problems. I failed to write new ones down, am using my wife's laptop pc while we're in Florida, so the passwords Firefox saved are on my pc at home.

One mystery to me is the time delay in activating and updating gadgets. I put a slideshow link on my sidebars to Flickr yesterday in blogspot and WordPress, and only 3 of 14 slides appeared. This morning all 14 of them appeared. I changed nothing.