Leadership requires patience. Some things will take years to unfold. That’s the job. If you’re good at it, and circumstances allow, you’ll see your strategy work out. For more than a decade, I have kept watch for opportunities to make my staff positions less precarious. Fortunately, it’s been working out. For context, I manage a variety of information professionals. We don’t all work in the library domain and so our operational demands vary. But most…

I’m confident our law library is not alone this winter when it comes to planning for straitened circumstances next year. 2021 will be a year of reduced budgets. We lost staff positions and funding equivalent to 15% of our 2020 budget, which itself had been reduced from 2019 by 8%. As they say, anyone can manage when things are going well. The hard choices are where you earn your keep. Budget cuts are always hard.…

I was on a virtual call recently about customer service improvement. Customer service is a key aspect of law library service. It’s an area where there tends to be a lot of chatter about how to make improvements. This call was meant to flesh out a methodology that might be helpful in improving service delivery. Instead, I was struck by how the approach used generalizations to segment the audience. In particular, the definition of what…