ON FAILURE

There’s an interesting article in the latest (November/December 2008, pp. 20-22) issue of Computers in Libraries. In Failure Is Always an Option, Daniel Chudnow [Library of Congress, Washington, DC] encourages us to look at how we fail and “to be willing to share what you’ve learned when things go wrong” (20).

This is one of the problems with the library literature—we only write about “how I did things good in my library,” our successes. We can learn much more from “how I screwed up in my library,” our failures, but you hardly ever read an article about that.

You should read this article, take it to heart, and write about your failures and what you learned from them.