Jamie M. Gray

I liked the section about creativity as well as the diversity chapter (surprisingly), I think, which suggested how to do a personal SWOT chart, which immediately made me think of one of the topics for our internal staff development day that we're fleshing out. I also appreciated the point about librarians' sometimes wrongheaded emphasis on quantifying our stuff -- not a new point to me, but one I agree with (previous reading on topic compared: Amazon etc don't around telling people they've show more got X number of books for sale). Oh, and the bit about networking at conferences was somewhat enlightening. I've yet to read an entire book on networking (note to self...) but this author made a couple points about how to approach it that were helpful. As a socially-backward introvert (as opposed to socially savvy people who happen to be introverted), it's all well and good to know I need to network network network, but I don't have a model for doing that effectively and it does not come naturally to me at all.

What didn't work for me:
Most the information was not new to me, and I'm pretty sure would not be new to anyone who has been on the job for a couple years already. Or potentially a more experienced librarian who finds they're a hot mess and needs to figure out some better strategies for being an effective employee. However, if we consider the self-selection of who's likely to be reading this book, it's probably mostly preaching to the choir.

The writing style also didn't do it for me. I get the tone the author was going for, but it just didn't work for me, and there are places where the banter could have been edited down. I also didn't care for the chapter formula, which meant a key word got defined via the dictionary every chapter. A couple times this worked. Most of the time, it reminded me of what I tell students to avoid doing: filling space with unnecessary basic background info because that's easier than critical analysis.

On the plus side, it was a quick read: chapters are short, as is the overall book. It was very easy to just knock the whole thing out, as opposed to having to slowly wade through a doorstopper and gambling on when to cut your losses. show less