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Lynn Johnston addressed a few recent reader comments about For Better or For Worse on her blog yesterday. What interested me most was this quote: "I have a limited time left here and every strip, now, is a statement that leads to the August 30th conclusion."

I think that's the first time I've seen a definite date for the end of the strip. Until now, I've just heard that it will end no later than September. Although, as I understand it, For Better or For Worse won't really end... it's just the current storyline in the present day with Liz, Anthony, Grandpa Jim, etc. that will conclude on August 30.

I got an email this morning from a student who was investigating sustainability in rural libraries. I sent him to the usual places like the The Center for the Study of Rural Librarianship and ALA’s resources for rural libraries but it got me thinking about sustainability generally. The whole tech boom and the “everything is on the internet” idea, really doesn’t affect most rural libraries that much. Sure, there are some communities that are thinking of ditching their libraries as a cost-cutting measure, but libraries still have a strong place in rural communities, often as the only access point to the internet and reading material for adults, young adults and children. They aren’t going anywhere.

They are, however, having a very hard time keeping up technologically and that’s where groups like MaintainIT come in. I have mentioned them before, I am on their steering committee. They’re a project of TechSoup, funded by the Gates Foundation. There are people from WebJunction on the committee. It’s a little bit of the usual suspects. I came to San Francisco for our once a year meeting where we talked about what the next year of the project is going to be like and what has happened so far. MaintainIT, if you don’t know, created “cookbooks” for libraries that gives them assistance with teachnical issues. You can go download them or look at them, they’re free. They’re even Creative Commons licensed so you can repurpose them and use them however you want to. They’re very well done and very informative.

It’s a neat project and yet has a few immediate problems. One, the idea of repurposing doesn’t really go far when what you have to work with is a PDF and you’re dealing with libraries who have never heard of the Creative Commons. Two, the cute language sometimes gets in the way of the really sound and solid technical advice these cookbooks have. Three, each year of the grant program that created this project focuses on different-sized libraries meaning the project doesn’t cohere around a specific userbase. It also serves 18 states, not fifty. Vermont is not one of the states it serves. Neither is Maine. California is one. So, while I really like the project, it’s gotten me very contemplative about sustainability. You see, the grant ends next year. And, like every single grant-funded project that happens in libraries, the big question at this point is “How do we continue to make an impact when we no longer have any staff or funding for it?” And that’s when you hit the idea of community. And that’s where libraries have something sustainable and grant-funded projects, even the best-meaning ones, don’t.

WebJunction was created to be the community that existed after the Gates Foundation library project was no longer providing support. WebJunction, however, still has staff and funding. WebJunction does not so much provide support as it offers an online community of librarians and others who sort of help each other. WebJunction is free but state libraries often pay to have a “branded” version of it. The amounts they pay are in the tens of thousands of dollars. You can see the VT WebJunction here. You can see the regular WebJunction here. I’ve already talked about WebJunction here before so I don’t need to guide you through the differences here (there are few) or point out the OCLC search box on the VT site that tells me that my nearest copy of Jane Eyre is in New Hampshire. I just want to mention that this “solution” has been less than optimal for my particular library region. I hope it has been better for others.

A community has not coalesced around WebJunction in Vermont. However there are communities in the small Vermont towns I work with that center around the library. The librarians I work with, while they’re cognizant of Google and the Internet generally, aren’t aware that there’s anything not sustainable about their libraries. The libraries are packed with people every day. They’re often the only place to even get high speed internet in the town. It’s definitely a pain that it’s hard for them to keep their computers running. However, it’s a bit of a stretch, to me, that they need to join a new community to do that. As much as I like and enjoy the Tech Soup, WebJunction and MaintainIT communities and the people involved in them specifically, I wonder about the best game plan for getting and keeping libraries tech savvy about their own IT needs and environment. Paying a local tech geek to fix some problem (say, like me) certainly doesn’t scale into something that you can replicate nationwide without replicating the cash that pays them. On the other hand, my job isn’t dependent on grant money and I’ve been doing this for almost three years which is coincidentally the life of this particular grant. The difference is, I’ll be doing this job next year and the grant won’t. Unless we can come up with something….

Where have I been? Well, very swept along by extremely rigorous travel and work schedule (and, as many of you know, swept away by a more personal undertow). When will I be back? Well, I'm not sure. But several times this last week I found myself thinking back to posts here, email strings there, and even real-time physical conversations over there (visiting OCLC last Mon-Fri). All of them renewed reminders that I'm striving for sychronicity. And although things are just starting to move from awareness and into practice, one little piece of something did click over and into sync for me this week. So I'll tell you about it, and maybe this can count as back (we'll see):

It started when a colleague of mine said that "social" aspect of what we do is "WOW. sticky. Kewl." We were in a large meeting. Everybody laughed. I laughed too. But then I paused. WOW. sticky. Kewl. That's it! (Later I learned that he had wanted to say "WOW. sexy. Kewl." but his group thought better of saying sexy in a meeting and so they changed it. Sexy. Sticky. Whatever. He captured the concept.) I mentioned it a few times to different people and got different reactions. Most people laughed. Some people got hung up on the sticky. (Is it good to be sticky? Or bad?) But everybody got it. "WOW. sticky. Kewl." is the it factor. It's that thing that's hard to describe, but that everybody knows about and comes back for. Some people have it. Some people don't. Some organizations have it. Some organizations don't. Some libraries have it. Some libraries don't.

Finding, having or being it is about finding, having and being that thing that keeps you, your organization or your library alive. And I don't mean alive that in the you're not dead, so you must be alive sense of the word. I mean it in that verve, vim and vigor sort of way. I'm talking about meaning, relevance and maybe even emotional draw. I'm talking about charisma and magnetism, maybe even charm. No wonder it is often associated with sexy. Should we even wonder then, when wow sticky kewl is associated with social?

I know it can't be the same thing for everyone. And I know I shouldn't try and essentially define it. But I do know that we've lost it when we stop at content or collections. It is dependent on human connection. It might even be about conversation and collaboration. This makes me wonder: are our personal it factors are the same as our professional ones? That's definitely what has happened to me at WebJunction, where this small little business idea (ItGirl) turned from a consulting gig to this real-life community project connecting more than 26,000 of us in libraryland. Putting that idea of connecting people with each other (as well as with information) at the center of my personal and professional life has been part of my and our success there.

So now I have to ask: could your personal it factor be the thing that helps your library find, have, and be alive? Or has it already? And does it (also) have to do with connection? How is that different from what we traditionally do or have done in libraries?