Barack Obama made history today as the first US President to officially come out in support of gay marriage (not “civil unions” aka the semantic wankery that gets used so often in the US to denote “different but equal“)
I was talking with a colleague today about the process of having to fire people. I said I’d had this experience twice – once when I had to fire someone, once when I begged for clemency for an employee whose job was on the line. (I thought this employee was being targeted for the wrong reasons and had huge potential to fulfill their duties. That person however, saw the writing on the wall and subsequently left the organization.)
My colleague said she knew someone who worked as a manager for a very large company and was frequently put in a position where they had to let someone go. This manager had a brilliant strategy for how to handle this tough responsibility. They would call the affected employee into a meeting and explain that they were going to have to let them go, laying out the case if necessary for why the decision was being made. The manager went on to explain that the employee had two options – they could be fired or they could choose to resign.
If they chose to resign, the employee would get all the benefits that were available to any departing employee – a farewell party, a two week window until their departure, a chance for closure – not only for the employee but for their co-workers. Needless to say, most employees this manager dealt with picked the “choose to resign” option.
During the farewell party, most departing employees would simply give some variation of “I’ve chosen to move on” while providing minimal details. Some might talk of vague plans to return to school or travel or other job opportunities.
The benefits of this approach were many – besides letting the departing employee save face, it helped quell the rumour mill and helped minimize the impact of employee departures on remaining employees.
Plus the manager who’s idea it was is now able to proudly speak of how few employees he had to fire during his long career – a proud achievement for any manager!
It’s a pretty well-known trick for making a successful cover version – take an up-tempo song and slow it down.
Still, Coldplay makes the old trick work by taking the Beastie Boys’ first and arguably best-known hit, the party anthem “Fight For Your Right (To Party)” and slowing it down to a near funeral dirge in tribute to the recently deceased group member, Adam “MCA” Yauch.
One of the pages I lost when my old blog disappeared was a page I created back in 2006 which had some of the background and criteria as well as winners, nominees, bios and even some photos for UWO’s “Spirit of Librarianship” Award in the MLIS program.
I still have the page where all this information was located but can’t decide whether to re-create the page on this blog, start a wiki (so others, still at FIMS, could update it as needed) or some other option (online database? Spreadsheet?)
Anyhow, until that’s decided (and because there’s a chance I may let it slide completely and never get around to doing it!), I thought I’d at least put a list of the past winners (including some I’d never gotten around to posting on the old page which the student council president sent me sometime in 2009.)
If anyone comes across this page and has updates, feel free to leave a comment with any updates – thanks!
“Spirit of Librarianship” Award Winners
Gloria Joy Jouppien (Winter 2003)
Chris Sheehy (Summer 2003)
Donald Moses (Fall 2003)
Alain Lamothe (Winter 2004)
Terri Milton (Summer 2004)
Sabina Iseli-Otto (Fall 2004)
Guida da Silva (Winter 2005)
Bex Blackburn (Summer 2005)
Sophia Apostol (Fall 2005)
Jason Hammond (Winter 2006)
Bruce Fyfe (Summer 2006)
Lindsay Holdsworth (Fall 2006)
Michelle Lake (Winter 2007)
Barb Janicek (Summer 2007)
Iona Reid/Gloria Liu (co-winners) (Fall 2007)
Avi Silberstein (Winter 2008)
Patrick Herman/Michael Seyler (co-winners) (Summer 2008)
I don’t think I’ve blogged about this yet but about a month ago, I moved into a new position at RPL as Outreach Services Librarian. This a one-year term position filling a maternity leave.
The past month has been a bit of a blur as I learn about my new position, the history and workflow of the unit I’m now in charge of as well as learning about what’s happening in the wider world (library and otherwise) in terms of service to the visually impaired, print-disabled and home readers (previously “homebound” and before that, “shut-ins”.)
This position feels like a great fit for me for all number of reasons – not least of which (which I didn’t get into at my interview as I didn’t think it was appropriate) but I’ve had a long history of vision troubles myself – going way back to when I was two years old and had two separate surgeries on my eye then on through undergrad when a potentially serious vision-related issue was discovered which is still being monitored to this day.
Below is a photo of part of my learning process in my new job. Along with RPL’s IT Manager, we met with the CNIB’s Assistive Technology Specialist to have a demo of some of the current assistive technology that’s available in preparation for some equipment that RPL will be purchasing for our system.
As a fan of technology (and one of the many reasons why this job feels like a good fit), the technology that’s available for the visually-impaired is especially impressive – screen readers, CCTV’s, voice recorders and much more. Very cool!
Midomi is a really cool site that lets you hum or whistle the melodies of songs you’ve forgotten and it will try to provide a match.
I was able to get it to recognize a Beatles song and “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” but had less success with a couple other (slightly) lesser-known songs. But still, pretty amazing technology and who knows, maybe my humming just isn’t up to snuff?
You can tell which sites I’ve had the longest history on by looking at my user name on the site. If it’s not “Headtale” then you know it’s a site I’ve been on for a LONG time – probably around 10-15 years.
There only a handful of sites that fit this criteria – CalgaryPuck, a fan site for the Calgary Flames is one. Hotmail and Yahoo are a couple others (jason_hammond on both of those though I really only use those log-ins sparingly now for sites within the Microsoft and Yahoo! family of companies.) Amazon.
And then there’s the grand-daddy of them all – MetaFilter where I’ve lurked since the mid-to-late 1990’s and been a formal member since just after 9/11 when I chose the very original user name of “jaybo” (and since it’s a site that doesn’t allow you to change your user name like many other newer sites do, that’s what I’m stuck with.)
A co-worker told me about this really cool Nashville-based, jazz-funk band called “Here Come The Mummies” who apparently play in costume to hide the fact that they’re all under contract to different labels as session musicians…
