Comments on: Know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em

By: stephanie

stephanie — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 20:34:24 +0000

6-8 hours per week!! Wow… that’s a big percentage of your time, particularly if those are 6-8 hours where you can’t do anything else. If you can’t delegate it, and it’s only benefitting a small number of people, I think I’d have to kill it of.

By: Holly

Holly — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 03:59:25 +0000

I agree it is hard to stop a service. Kudo’s again to Meredith for recognizing that it may need to stop and being willing to stop. Should catalogers look into this (are all those marc fields needed?) Sorry I can’t help with more specifics but it sounds like you know it is time to fold them and I would bet you are right. If not, you will hear about it! Then that is good feedback. Good luck.

By: Meredith Farkas

Meredith Farkas — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 21:20:06 +0000

Thank you, Char, for the inspiration. I get so much out of your blog and am looking forward to meeting you at Computers in Libraries.

By: Deborah

Deborah — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 20:49:06 +0000

Where it’s the sort of service amenable to it, we often do a pilot project first to see what kind of interest it gets. That’d solve the problem Jenica’s talking about, because there’s a set stopping date, so the ensuing decision is not “Should we stop?” but “Should we set this up permanently?” It doesn’t necessarily help to answer that question though…

Late last year a colleague and I trialed a “laptop librarian” project (though due to dodgy-minded colleagues we called it “library on location” ) — taking a trolley out to student cafes with popular books, DVDs, etc and a laptop to issue them with and provide reference services. Results were definitely in the grey area; I need to get together with her some time to write them up and figure out if we want to push to develop the concept some more.

By: char

char — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 20:37:54 +0000

thanks for the mention, meredith – it’s a good day over at infomational.

By: Jenica

Jenica — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 18:40:41 +0000

It’s hard to stop a service! That’s what I’ve learned — it’s just as hard to stop as to start, often because you know you’re serving a FEW users, or because it’s “better than doing nothing”. But the problem with failing to stop when you should is that you end up doing whatever it is very badly — because you know it’s not worth the effort you’re giving it. So is it somehow better to provide a badly managed service than to kill it outright?

I struggle with this one, day to day, and I suspect (hope?) many others do, as well. I wish I knew how to gather the gumption to say “No. We’re stopping this.”