Obnoxious Librarian from Hades Read Online Free PDF Page A

at a nice hotel on company expense. But I have to come up with a proposal that looks real enough, yet will not encourage my boss to really believe that libraries can be profit centers. A library is a shrine and treasure of wisdom, a sanctuary of stillness and the center of tranquility. Not a profit center.
    I close the door of the library, put on the 'closed' sign (“library closed for upgrading to ISBN-13”) and hammer away at my keyboard.
    FROM BOOKS TO DOLLARS – THE HADES LIBRARY AS PROFIT CENTER
    Based on best practices gathered at the seminar, which I benchmarked with industry peers, I have come up with the following ideas to have the library perform at an economic optimum.
    1. Use contextual advertising on the corporate intranet;
    2. Sell confidential company reports on eBay;
    3. Put advertising on all scanned company records;
    4. Sell copies of our telephone directory to headhunters and competitors;
    5. Rip out the last page of every book and when asked for, sell them;
    6. Also, remove the conclusion of every electronic article ordered and charge for it;
    7. Charge $1 per minute when calling the library.
    Good, I got that done. Now I am off to the seminar where I can skip all the presentations and workshops. This leaves me more time to catch up on listening to audio novels, check out the hotel pool bar and in general “network”.

The one with a cunning plan
    It is Tuesday afternoon 4 PM in the library and I have unplugged the phones and shut the door. I am in love. Head over heals. For the past three days I cannot think straight, every waking moment is spent dreaming and longing. But it is an impossible love.
    The object of my affection is the iDop Feel, the new multimedia-lifestyle device that has been launched earlier last week after months of speculation about features, colors, name and price. The iDop is everything I want and more. It has a 5 mega pixel camera (ideal to create hi-res photos for blackmailing), Wifi and an internet browser (so I can check out Flickr's stupid library signs stream during lunch), an MP3 player (so I can listen to "Tales of a librarian" by Tori Amos and the audio book of Melvil Dewey's life), a video player (so I can watch bootlegs of the Australian comedy "The Librarians"), a lightweight yet powerful instant messenger (so I can gossip with other library bloggers), the most advanced photo browsing software (which on the fly removes wrinkles, grey hairs and goofy smiles), gigabytes of storage space and (drum roll) a near-perfect e-book reader. Gasp. With this device, I'd never have to talk to another human being or get bored!
    But alas, Perfection also has a price tag. In the case of the iDop Feel, that price is way over my budget. But I want one. I need one. I must have one. It would be my precious!
    If only I could persuade my boss to buy me one. Hmmmm. Now, that's an idea.
    So to quote Baldrick from Blackadder: "I've got a plan so cunning you could put a tail on it and call it a weasel."
    I start off by calling one of the managers in the Knowledge & Learning Department. That department is the brainchild of one of the vice presidents and is fighting for power with IT, which I report up to. Both departments claim to own "knowledge management", or to be more precise: the obscene budget for knowledge management, a concept so vague you can fund many projects with dizzy acronyms and non-measurable outcomes. A bit like marketing.
    Anyway, I entice him to play a pawn in my new game:
    "Hi there, did you get the memo about the enhanced knowledge facilitation paradigm shift program the IT VP started? I think you guys should be included in this… ."
    "Woah there, what's that?"
    "Well, I just got this memo about how IT will 'shape the company's tacit knowledge retention curve by clustering organization wide wisdom sharing sources on a single device… "
    "Could you send me a copy of that memo? Because I am sure the Knowledge Officer would be interested in that".
    And of course I am more than