TechEssence.info

I was recently asked by Blake Carver, of LIShost, to answer a few questions for an upcoming presentation he was making. I thought that my answer might be interesting to others, so I'm reposting it here. He asked me what is in my "toolbox" (online and offline) that helps me do the following things:

1) Be more productive

This is an interesting and tricky question. I can answer for myself, but in
classic style I will have to say that "your mileage may vary" -- in fact,
I'm fairly certain it will. But I will try to call out those things that are
more broadly applicable.

As someone who is not employed as a programmer, but who has needed enough
technical skills to prototype and develop proof-of-concept services that can
then be re-engineered in a production environment, I've found the following
skills essential:

• Knowledge of a scripting language. I know Perl, but others may suffice as
  well for some things. The think about Perl is that it is very well suited to
  text processing, which is what you often need to do with metadata records.
  With tools like regular expressions, substringing, splitting, and others,
  there really is very little you can't do in processing piles of metadata or
  virtually any text file (I've used these skills, for example, to transform
  en masse all of the HTML files of a web site).
• Experience with text indexing software. In my case, I know Swish-e quite
  well, and it has served me in good stead for over 15 years. I've used it
  continuously over that period, and it still powers most of my web sites.
  Lately I've been indexing over 2 million MARC records with it and a search
  that returns all of the records performs quite well.
• Facility with XML and XSLT. I'm really beginning to think that with XML,
  XSLT, Swish-e and Perl there really is nothing I can't do in libraries. As I
  mentioned above, I can create a usable interface to 2 million MARC records
  using only these tools. The one piece that I can't handle well with these
  tools is immediate updating. For that, it is helpful to have...
• Knowledge of a decent database application. Most like this would be
  MySQL, but it could just as easily be PostgreSQL or something else. This
  provides real-time updating when such is required.
• XTML and CSS knowledge. As we all know, pretty much everything is
  delivered through the web, and this is the mechanism required to do so. CSS
  is incredibly powerful when joined up with well-structured XHTML. Once you
  learn it, you will NEVER go back.

Skills that are more generally applicable include:

• The ability to skim and summarize. Reading a lot of professional
  literature, whether in journals or blogs, is required these days to keep up.
  You can cover a lot more ground if you don't read every sentence, but scan
  instead, and uncover the juicy bits without getting bogged down in the
  details.
• Finding and using filtering sources. I've long thought that using
  filtering sources is an important tool to keep up -- so much so that 19
  years ago I invented one. Called "Current Cites" it attempts to find the
  best of the information technology literature and provide a one paragraph
  summary. A team of volunteers has published it every month for nearly two
  decades. There are others as well -- seek them out and use them.
• Learning as you breathe -- that is, all the time without even thinking
  about it. We must learn constantly or else soon be relegated to ignorance
  and apathy.
• Doing only what really must get done. Out of all the work facing you,
  there is very likely work that really should get done and work that isn't
  all that important. Cultivate a sense of what to prioritize. If you focus on
  what absolutely needs to happen to support your organization's mission and
  goals, by definition that which does not get done doesn't need to.
• Understanding what is best done at the last minute. Not all things
  require early and ongoing attention. I hardly ever do presentations, for
  example, ahead of time. Last week I arrived at a two-day conference where I
  was to provide the summation, and put it together during the conference.
  Another time I arrived a conference with something prepared, but threw it
  away after speaking to the organizers and created what they really needed
  from scratch that night for the next morning. Any time spent preparing the
  presentation I arrived with was wasted.
• Becoming skillful at a few key tools of the trade. Only you can decide
  which tools these are for your given position, but whatever they are, learn
  them well. I mentioned throwing together a presentation while at a
  conference, and I had a colleague who was looking over my shoulder remark
  that she didn't know Powerpoint that well. She probably didn't need to, but
  given as many presentations as I give in a year, I did. If I were
  inefficient at doing it, I would be wasting a lot of time.

2) Increases your visibility in the profession (presence)

Writing and speaking has increased my presence in the profession
immeasurably. Beginning (in my case) with a book in the Fall of 1992
(Crossing the Internet Threshold with Anne Lipow and John Ober), I was able
to parlay that into a variety of workshop and speaking opportunities.
Writing magazine and journal articles eventually gave me the confidence to
pitch the idea for a column to Library Journal, where I wrote monthly for
ten years.

Being exposed in such a way brought speaking invitations, which when I
performed adequately led to more. Now I blog as well, also for Library
Journal, as well as for my day job and at TechEssence.info. I also use
Twitter.

3) Connects you to others when you need help/ideas

I started the Web4Lib electronic discussion in 1994, and it has helped me tremendously
over the years with information, assistance, advice and professional
development. The community is very knowledgeable and I think it has actually
fostered the learning and professional development of many librarians,
thereby making the transition to the Web as smooth as possible given the
tremendous upheaval it represented in how we do things.

In recent years I've also appreciated the Code4Lib IRC chatroom, which is where about 40-50 library programmers
and techies "congregate" online on a daily basis. Most people probably have
not experienced a chatroom, so what it is is basically a group instant
messaging system -- whenever someone in the room types something in,
everyone else sees it. Although some days I hardly look at the window for
the chatroom, I find it not only a comfort, as I've come to know many people
there, but also as a place where I can as a quick question and often get an
answer immediately.