Thing #23

I was teasing the rest of the Web Challenge committee at our meeting #14 (yikes!) yesterday, that my entire post for Thing #23 would be one word:

Whew!

It has been a lot of work and its not done yet, of course. There is the final prep for Staff Development Day and all the blog reading yet to be done to track all the progress of every player.
Then writing the final report, deciding if we want to do it again (yes!), planning a budget for next year, etc., etc.

What did I get out of it? I learned new things like I hope every player did. I used Web 2.0 tools for a real project in a more extensive way that ever before. I don't think we could have managed the Web Challenge without Google Docs and Google Reader. I also had a wonderful time with a committee that embraced the concept of learning and fun with enthusiasm. Performing as the voice of a toy T. Rex complaining about short arms making blogging difficult is not anything I thought I'd ever do at work but it was great fun. (It was a tiny piece of the committee's presentation at the Spring 2008 Admin Forums).

The combination of skills, good humor and hard work displayed by the committee members made my work as chair a real pleasure. I don't think I've ever laughed so much and gotten so much done at the same time. Thank you, Chris, Lara, Sally, Jill, Kristen, Elizabeth, and Glynis.

I've enjoyed helping people with the different things. I have to find a way to teach more at work.

I'm sure the library should continue as part of Open World Cat, we should use Google Docs and Zoho to work with other staff more smoothly, establish our own Reference Best Practices Wiki, add Library Thing tags to our catalog, and establish and promote more RSS feeds from OCL (how about one about new titles?). Is that enough for now?

Come back to my blog sometime since I hope to continue to write about information, searching, hints and tips and interesting reference questions.

Happy playing!