Thing 7 -- and that's it for the day.

I have successfully putzed away the better part of the day by looking at the Thing 7 tools. Now I'm supposed to take this information overload, sift, shuffle, collate, and bring forth something that sounds moderately intelligent? Ah, well, crazier things have happened.

Let's take it step by step.

E-mail. Where would we be without e-mail? It's brilliantly useful for communicating some things, but not nuance. I learned early on to never use an e-mail to communicate information that could be misinterpreted (of course, having learned this doesn't mean that I always remember). Person-to-person or phone will always be best for that.

And IM'ing, which I've done a few times, is even worse for losing contextual niceties. I would love to see GRRL offer some kind of IM reference. In that context, I think it's an amazingly good idea. However, I worry about branches being called upon to provide similar service. At our little branch we have only two staff people - myself and my very part time branch assistant - who answer patron questions. We're one of the slower branches in the system, but I still can't imagine doing any kind of competent job if I were asked to provide IM responses to patrons. First and foremost, we need to be getting out from behind our desk as often as possible. We need to be engaging the people who are in the library and finding out if they need reader's advisory suggestions, if they're finding what they need. We need to be building relationships and creating connections.

I did go onto the Google 23 Things group and post a reply to someone's comment about the 7th Thing. It was easy, but I don't know that I would be going back to check for new postings on that group if I was not knee-deep in the 23 Things project.

Text messaging... FWIW, and I readily admit that IANAE, but I find it obtuse, obscure and just plain ridiculous. IYKWIMAITYD (Lost? Try www.netlingo.com.) Are there ways that libraries could use it, such as holds and overdue notifications? Sure, that's a possibility, I suppose. But I really, really hate Text Messaging. IMHO.