Author Archives: ulrike

Leadership lessons from fiction? What we can learn from Game of Thrones

Have you read George R.R. Martin’s series of novels, A Song of Ice and Fire or do you know the HBO adaptation Game of Thrones?

Bruce Craven teaches Leadership through Fiction at the Columbia Business School in New York and he gives some advices:

If you must face a difficult challenge then accept that challenge and face it.

One central character says “When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die. There is no middle ground.” But she is wrong. Of course there is a middle ground. “It is the realm of thoughtful decision making, with a full appreciation of other people’s values and beliefs. If you decide to play the game of business, learn to understand and leverage your abilities in this middle ground.”

https://www.strategy-business.com/article/Leadership-lessons-from-Game-of-Thrones?gko=33bc5&sf210284958=1

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Game_of_Thrones

 

Is hugging completly off-limits in the workplace?

There is a Xing newsletter and sometimes they really draw attention to interesting articles. It seems a bit strange in times of me too discussions and times where managers avoid being alone with just one employee in the elevator to ask if hugging is completly off-limits in the workplace or not. But it is also a cultural problem. For some societies it might be remarkable to have physical contact and in others it is not because it is part of the communication system and the welcoming. Are you interested to discuss the situation at your library or in your country? I would love to receive your comments.

Is hugging completly off-limits in the workplace?

Hamburg Open Online University

In 2015 the Hamburg Senate, the government of the City and the state Hamburg in Germany, founded a digital strategy to bundle up all digital processes and create structures for those. For education, the Hamburg Open Online University (HOOU) stands for this. This cross-university project is funded by the network of the six state-owned Hamburg universities and the government.
In the future, the HOOU wants to enrich and supplement the classical teaching of the Hamburg universities with the possibilities of digital technologies. The learning offers of the HOOU are to be made freely accessible to all interested in the Internet.

The peculiarity of the concept lies in the desire to create a digital space in which students, teachers as well as the interested public can meet to work together on interdisciplinary, cross-university projects with academic aspirations. And it also should be a low-threshold offer for refugees.

Four aspects serve as guiding principles:

  1. Orientation on learners and collaboration
  2. Science
  3. Opening up to new target groups and civil society relevance
  4. Openness /OER

The content is constantly growing and a number of learning courses and webinars are in different languages, for ex. interactive programming courses, topics in law and economics, sonic environments for healing, project management in urban design or the sounds of the Port City Hamburg.

Beside this they offer a lot of materials (eg texts, pictures, videos or links) on a specific topic, such as a specific research question or learning unit.

If the content of HOOU is not interesting for you it might be interesting for your users and customers.

 

German library conference 2019

The German library conference took place this year in Leipzig. It is the biggest annual librarian`s conference in Europe. More than 260 lectures, workshops and hand-on-labs were presented together with a huge exhibition of hard-, software and services. Under the title “Libraries for change”  4000 librarians from Germany, neighbouring countries and abroad met to discuss a huge variety of topics. Societies are changing and libraries have to follow these dynamics with innovative concepts and lifelong learning staff members.

The last three years ALA was partner of the German library associations. This year the official partnership switched to the Netherlands where the libraries are very active to promote “the library as a third place”.

One of the recurring themes were fake news and the best way to deal with. “Put the focus on the victims and the outcome instead of only looking at the offenders and give them another platform to be famous” a journalist proposed.

More and more frequently, false information is scattered across all communication channels in order to influence public opinion or to discredit other-minded people. Portrait photos with quotes take out of context, which are often distributed via social networks, are just the tip of the iceberg. In their role as information brokers, libraries must counter this and empower more and more people to distinguish fake news from actual news. There were plenty of suggestions for such formats for work on the ground – especially for the youth. And of course the education and strengthening of our own staff is very important not only in this context.

More than 400 presentations are already uploaded online for those who want to recap or had not the chance to participate in Leipzig. Most of the follow-ups are in German but some are in English, too.  And more will be uploaded in the next weeks. At the  BIB Opus publication server you can also find the presentations of the past German and Austrian library conferences, the articles of some German library journals in fulltext and more.

A healthy work limit is 39 hours per week

New research of the Australian National University (ANU) found out that people who work more than 39 hours a week are putting their health at risk. “Long work hours erode a person’s mental and physical health, because it leaves less time to eat well and look after themselves properly,” Leed researcher Dr Dinh said.
The research used data from about 8,000 Australian adults as part of the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey.

http://www.anu.edu.au/news/all-news/a-healthy-work-limit-is-39-hours-per-week

Libraries shaping the future: good practice toolkit published in UK

This is a best practice guide, produced by the UK Leadership for Libraries Taskforce, for chief executives and library portfolio holders, including how library services can support local authority priorities.

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/libraries-shaping-the-future-good-practice-toolkit/libraries-shaping-the-future-good-practice-toolkit