while on vacation i finished “slam dunks and no brainers: language in your life, the media, business, politics, and, like, whatever” by leslie savan. her chapter on “the community of commitment centered words” reminded me that we have to have intention and, really, integrity around “community-building” when we talk about it, otherwise it’s just a lot of puff. after reading her chapter i went back to one of our chapter drafts with a new eye. we did ok, but there were a few spots where the community puff was hiding real substantive contribution – not surprisingly, our editor noticed something awry in the same spots. so, back to the drawing board…

one more thing – with all this techy CB stuff going on – there will be something “new” in the positioning of both online & local community building as essentially the same type of activity. but, we’ll see how that goes…

Back when I was an outreach librarian, it was clear that there was the “library community” in town and then the people who never came to the library. Figuring out why those people didn’t come in — fines they’d gotten as teenagers, reference librarians who were unpleasant to them, can’t talk on cell phones, bad library hours — and seeing what we could do about those things was a really interesting challenge.

I’m looking forward to reading what you and Steven have written mostly because I’m really interested in the question “what more is there to say about this?” and I’m sure you’ll have several good answers.