by Cindy Romaine, SLA President 2011

Just 365 days ago, the first post went up on FutureReady365. From its inception, the FutureReady365 blog had one big, wild, hairy, audacious goal. We sought answers to a single, provocative question: How are YOU Future Ready? A dedicated team of volunteers committed to publishing a new post every day of 2011 and—WE DID IT!

Over the course of 2011, information professionals from around the world posted solutions, strategies, tactics, and tips. They showcased how they are preparing for a future that is indeed bright. It was a great conversation on an important topic, and your contribution made us smarter and better informed.

So before I look back, I’d like to thank my team of stalwart volunteers. And I have to express my admiration for everyone who posted for us. And I have to thank the readers who participated, posted comments, and kept coming back for more. Thank you all!

For me, personally, it was a great experience to serve as a catalyst to this conversation. As I bow out as SLA President and we prepare to re-invent FutureReady365, I want to share a few lessons I learned from the posts and from the experience of running a daily blog.

Great members, great posts

1. What’s Hot. We’re faced with a lot of seemingly orthogonal issues, related only tangentially, but they do connect to the issues of the day. The blog followers are amazingly adept at connecting the dots and reacting quickly. There were three issues that we kept hearing about, in one form or another:

• How information pros are adding value.
• The importance of collaborating constantly.
• The necessity of embracing technology.

2. Already There. Many SLA members and information professional are already engaged in some very interesting, completely future-ready activities. Whether you are working with data fusion, e-readers, or mobile apps, you get it and you’re there.

3. Business Savvy Required. The most savvy members have survived and thrived in an amazing technological revolution. But the best geeks don’t make the best information professionals. There are some core attributes on the business side that can make or break your career. Technology AND business acumen are required in order to be Future Ready.

4. It’s Quotable. There was some great writing on the site, and it is impossible to narrow it down, but here a few examples of one-liners that I liked:

• “Pick yourself.” ~ Dale Stanley, April 6
• “Stick your nose into other people’s conversations.” ~ Gloria Miller, March 3
• “They call it ‘data fusion.’ I call it sexxxay!” ~ Juliane Schneider, April 15
• “… define your library as a place for innovation and experimentation….” ~ Helen Josephine, March 10

Embracing the Daily Grind
I had never managed a publishing effort on this scale, and none of the FutureReady team had either. But at the end of the day, it all came down to something many SLA members are exceedingly good at: project management. We created a schedule, assigned roles, and became a well-oiled machine. Here are some random musings about how we did it.

5. SLA is made up of tribes. The divisions and chapters have their own interests and personalities, and they’re never shy about expressing their feelings. And that’s good! It took us about half the year to figure that out, and to tap into it efficiently. When we did, it was like rocket fuel.

6. Go Team! It’s hard to overstate the enormous contribution and dedication it took to implement this project. Here’s a shout out to the team: Meryl B. Cole, Michelle Mayes, Arik Johnson, Christian Gray, Jill Strand, Chris Vestal, Tiffany Renshaw, Jamal Cromity, Lorene Kennard, Dennie Heye, Sharon Rivers, Cindy Shamel, Kendra Levine, and many others.

7. The power of social media is in the connections. Sure, I know what you are thinking: “Thank you, Captain Obvious.” But seriously, human beings are social creatures. Something deep in our DNA makes us love to share and learn from each other. Camaraderie was essential to the FutureReady365 success, and just like with the holiday spirit, it’s as much fun to give as it is to receive.

8. Social media is free, but it is not cheap. It takes many man-hours to staff a robust social media program. It takes planning, hard work, and energized people who make and keep their commitments. There was nothing accidental about our success. We improvised, overcame, and adapted, all with amazing agility, and we walked the talk about what it takes to be Future Ready while doing it.

It was good for me
The FutureReady365 blog benefited me on a personal level, too. I always had something to talk about with fellow professionals. “Always be recruiting” became my mantra, and I learned to be boringly consistent so that others would know what to expect from me. Here’s what it meant to my personal journey:

9. I can rise to the occasion. I learned that I can reach deep inside of myself and pull out something that I did not know was there. I can be outside of my comfort zone pretty much all the time and still breathe. It was taxing, and sacrifices were made, but, at the end of a terrific year, I can say—it was worth it.

10. Go big or go home. I also learned that when people put their trust in you and give you their vote, you can’t be shy. You can’t plan a modest agenda. If you try hard and fail, at least you tried. If you try hard and succeed, you can feel really, really good about it.

11. SLA Rocks. Finally, recently, I led a delegation to Cuba for a professional exchange. Frankly, it is not a wealthy country; internet connections are slow or non-existent, and the computers are seriously outdated. Can you say 3.5-inch floppy? Yet somehow, the librarians manage to put together useful collections and provide good services, so their spirit gets an A+. All this made me realize—yet again—that this is a pretty darn good profession to be in.

I’ve been getting a lot of questions about what will become of FutureReady365 in the future. Turn it in to an HBO Special? Or should I go with a Discovery Channel reality show? How about a New York Times best-seller? We’ll have to wait and see. Then again, in his December 30 blog post, Brent Mai, SLA’s 2012 President, challenged me to take this blog to the next level. Who knows? Maybe you’ll be hearing from me AGAIN!

Thanks a million – truly.

Cindy Romaine is SLA President 2011. She is the owner of Romainiacs Intelligent Research and long-time active member of SLA and the Oregon Chapter.

The Division of Government Information is delighted to be posting on the Future Ready 365 blog this week. DGI is a diverse community of knowledgeable information professionals who share an interest in government information and government librarianship. Our posts this week come from librarians in a variety of government library environments including federal, military, and academic. These DGI blog contributors share their insights on navigating the complicated landscape that today’s information professional must travel — from getting that library job to staying on top in a rapidly changing field once you’re there. Maybe you’d like to join us on the journey! Come check out the Division of Government Information at:  http://govinfo.sla.org/.

It doesn‘t exactly take a rocket scientist to notice that libraries have changed more in the last couple of decades than they did in the century before that. When I started in this business, I learned how to order LC cards using paper forms. Last week I used the web-based administrative module of a vendor to link our ILS with the vendor‘s database of periodical articles. This represents a sea change in our profession. Again, not rocket science, but of more than passing interest to practitioners.

I‘m privileged to work in a medium-sized library that supports a small school providing mid-career graduate education to military officers. The service we give them was unimaginable two decades ago. We have people in our organization who seriously propose getting rid of a library that has been in place for a century because everything you need to know is on the web. Technological change has weaseled its way into our hearts.

This isn’t a paean to the forgotten days of yore. Libraries are better, and a hell of a lot better, than they were when I started. In 1972, when I slithered into my first professional job, no one seriously considered that it could ever be possible to hand a college student everything he needed to complete a term paper in five minutes. No one had even heard of unmediated database searching. Of course, that was the year before we got electricity and sold the mule.

Change is good. Change is life. Our business is different now, and will be ridiculously, revoltingly different in another decade. Yeah, yeah, grandpa, so what?

Well, the So What is that managers have to deal with the change. I have multicultural employees, patrons from eighty-seven countries (this year), and people whose business, maybe their physical survival, is dependent on the newest news, the latest research, the best understanding of something they never heard of before last week. Right now, the way to do that is a mix of mediated and unmediated searching, wide-ranging database access, good connectivity, careful attention to collection development, and comprehensive personal service. My building is going to be renovated starting this fall and I have to figure out how to keep services going. High excitement!

Well, never mind. We‘ll work it out. Libraries can do this stuff. Librarians can do this stuff. And we will.

Ed Burgess is the director of the Combined Arms Research Library in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. He is practicing to become a windy curmudgeon in his old age.

Hello from Wisconsin! We are delighted to contribute a week’s worth of postings from the Midwest! You’ll see that Wisconsin isn’t just about the cheese—our chapter boasts 120 members from diverse environments: corporate, law, academic, and other settings, many of us from unique national companies and associations. Our state’s two library schools have renewed focus on special librarianship and growing interest from our student members is evident. We are an active, enthusiastic chapter and happy to contribute our thoughts on future readiness! It’s great in the Dairy State!

I remember Atari: Little square blob flies around the mostly blank screen while you and a friend wrestle with the joystick and its single red button to score points and win. Then came Mario (and a few more buttons)… Eventually, video games came with a mandatory start tutorial where you guided your character to jump and run around the screen to demonstrate you had sufficient skill to begin playing the game!

Remember when you could walk into a library and just use the card catalogue to find the stuff you needed? Simple, easy‐to‐grasp, low‐tech. And no, cataloguing did not spring fully formed from the ground; there was so so much work put into making that card catalogue system easy, usable, predictable, standardized… And finally we seem to have gotten through the dark ages of figuring out how to get our records web‐accessible in a way that makes sense to users. In many public libraries, records are now married to Amazon or LibraryThing records to better utilize the very familiar navigation that web‐saavy patrons intuitively understand.

Yes, one can also argue that a physical card catalogue requires training to use properly – how many kids these days would know how to use one? – and you’d be right. But it used to be the adage “teaching someone to fish and you’d feed him for a lifetime” held true. Nowadays, you can teach someone to fish but next week you’ll likely watch in frustration as they attempt to harpoon an angry bird with their fishing rod – the evolution is that fast and varied.

Example: This past month I ran two identical training sessions, one week apart, on the use of free online resources. My presentation had screen shots and hotlinks to the websites I was highlighting… During the second session, I was surprised to discover that one website’s entire layout had drastically changed, already outdating the information I’d passed along to the previous group! Also close to home: how many times have you run a training session on a digital resource and found that you need to explain how the print or save button will behave because it doesn’t behave as you would “normally” assume it would? (Yes, I’m talking to you, [Insert favorite subscription database with a wonky interface here]!)

Again, for the most part we’ve gotten through the messy period of databases finding themselves: the My Account button is now generally located in the accepted upper‐righthand location, etc etc… but there are still no standards. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve logged into a subscription resource only to spend more time trying to find the log out button than it took to locate, print, and deliver the article I sought. To their credit, many mainstream databases are currently ditching their old layouts (and even algorithms) to give people a Google‐y experience. Several major publishers that come to mind actually have touted in training sessions how “like Google” their simple layout is. (Though some have, sadly, buried Boolean searching in the process.) Overall, navigations are improving – partially as the web matures (long live the dynamic web!), partially as different tech for accessing the web matures (huzzah for smart phones!).

One saving grace, oddly enough, may be the mergers. I recently attended a LawLibConversation on legal publishing mergers, where the panel discussed positive and negative outcomes of such mergers. One major benefit discussed at the time: the navigation of these interfaces can sometimes drastically improve after a merger.

Cue my “Future Ready” bit. Librarians – be a part of this conversation. As platforms boil down to certain standard looks/feels/tastes, it would behoove us, as people who know information seeking behavior better than most, to try to engage in this process when possible. And if it’s not possible to get in that door, we should at the very least make sure we’re on top of the industry buzz. E.g. I’m keeping an excited eye on responsive web design *hint hint*.

Megan Wiseman is the Librarian for Weiss Berzowski Brady LLP in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She is currently the Vice President for the Law Librarians Association of Wisconsin and tweets @LibraryatLaw.

by Dr. Sandra Hirsh, Silicon Valley Chapter, Leadership & Management Division

Tomorrow’s information professionals, who are in graduate school today, need to be ready for the rapid changes facing our profession. When they complete their degrees, will they be prepared to enter a profession that’s evolving so quickly? I encourage students (and those who mentor them) to start thinking creatively and flexibly about future career opportunities as early as possible in their graduate program.

Today’s MLIS students need to think broadly about their skillset and how they can apply their knowledge to a wide range of career pathways. LIS professionals have valuable and unique skills that are in growing demand, yet many of today’s students don’t recognize the value of an MLIS degree. During their MLIS program, students should take the time to network with faculty members, practitioners, and industry leaders, who can inspire them to think more broadly about the range of career opportunities for tomorrow’s LIS professionals.

Students need to be strategic as they choose their courses, thinking about how the knowledge they gain in graduate school can help them pursue tomorrow’s jobs. They should take advantage of their program’s academic advising and career development tools, and read blogs about emerging trends for LIS jobs. As our field is quite broad, before selecting courses, students need to understand the relevance of specific electives to potential career pathways they may want to pursue. Students should also complete an internship, where they can make connections with practitioners, gain real-world experience, and see how their skills can be applied in a variety of professional settings.

I also think it’s critical for today’s MLIS students to be comfortable exploring and adapting to new technology, as technology will continue to play an important role in our profession. Students should seek out opportunities to use technology in their learning activities. For example, students should be comfortable using web conferencing, blogs, wikis, and social networking sites. They should make it a priority to explore how technology is impacting our profession so they emerge from graduate school ready to share their ideas with their employers.

Today’s MLIS students also need to develop a lifelong learning community, made up of a diverse group of colleagues, who are eager to collaborate and explore solutions to changing priorities. While still in school, students should take time to build their professional network. One way this can be accomplished is through participation in professional associations, including student chapters based at their university.

In the past, attending professional conferences has posed challenges because of difficulties getting time off work and affording travel expenses. However, many professional conferences are now offered virtually, opening up new opportunities to get involved in conference planning, presentations, and networking. For example, the upcoming Library 2.011 worldwide virtual conference in November will bring together a global audience to explore how the digital age is impacting the roles libraries and librarians play in how we learn and consume information. These types of conferences provide excellent venues for students to get involved in the professional community and learn about new trends in our field.

It’s an exciting time to be preparing tomorrow’s information professionals. I look forward to feedback from any of you who would like to engage in further dialogue about how MLIS programs can help today’s students be future ready.

Sandra Hirsh is Professor and Director of the School of Library and Information Science at San José State University. Prior to joining the School as Director, she worked in the Silicon Valley for more than a decade at major technology companies: Hewlett Packard and Microsoft. As an industry user experience researcher, leader, and manager, she contributed to R&D research projects and influenced the user experience of web, mobile, and TV consumer products resulting in 5 U.S. patents. She was previously an assistant professor at the University of Arizona, and has taught courses for San José State University and the University of Washington.

Hello from the nation’s capital!  DC/SLA is excited to be contributing all of this week’s FutureReady365 posts (thanks to our future-thinking Communications Secretary, Chris Vestal).  We are a diverse community of 800+ information professionals, with members from D.C., Maryland, Virginia, as well as 30 other U.S. states and 12 countries.  You’ll see this diversity reflected in the range of future ready ideas presented in posts throughout the week.  We hope our posts will spark some thought and conversation and, of course, your comments. Most of all, we want to help keep the spark of the FutureReady blog alive  – a spark that’s become a fire, gathering us around it to brainstorm our way into the future. — Mary Talley, DC/SLA President (2011)

by Victor Monti, Washington, DC Chapter, Social Science Division

Future Ready means anticipating trends, responding quickly to breakthroughs and knowing what fundamentals are constant.

You need to study the art of being aware of where the the library and information professional arena is headed in terms of upcoming advancements. Social media, the Cloud, more and cheaper memory, the rise of tablets.  Be prepared as you hone in on and discover what is up next. So, you have to look at blogs in your area and be on useful listservs and network with colleagues and attend training and information sessions. Use different media and venues to expand your horizon and be aware of changes coming to the profession.

And even with some expectations for what is arriving on the information scene, there will be the unanticipated and sudden outbursts from exploding ideas in communication and knowledge. The next big technical device or communication medium will quickly change the existing operating climate. You will have to learn about a new technology fast and then be able to turn that into value for your library, knowledge center and greater organization. Even with all of our best thought out plans, a surprise in the way we do business allows us to capitalize on innovation for our agency. Seize the new concepts and exploit them in spreading information and knowledge more effectively.

Finally, we have to recall the basics of the profession. Information – its categorization, retrieval, ease of use and analysis into productive knowledge. There will always be the need for information. Our lives are enhanced with the more that we know. Library and Information professionals are the facilitators, the liaisons for sharing the ideas, thoughts and concepts that we strive to understand and utilize. There will always be a need to better deliver information to the world. There are now more ways to get information to our customers but the idea of serving our clients with data, facts and knowledge is part of who we are and will be.

Future Ready is where we are and where we are going. Embrace change in information delivery. Keep our values of accessible knowledge constant.

PS – FR ready joke.  Are Archivists past ready?
Victor Monti is a nontraditional library and information professional working in IT Management for DOD Departments.  After a year in the Pentagon Library on the Reference staff, he has worked for the IT offices in the headquarters staff of the Air Force, Army and Defense Information Systems Agency (DOD-wide).

Hello from the nation’s capital!  DC/SLA is excited to be contributing all of this week’s FutureReady365 posts (thanks to our future-thinking Communications Secretary, Chris Vestal).  We are a diverse community of 800+ information professionals, with members from D.C., Maryland, Virginia, as well as 30 other U.S. states and 12 countries.  You’ll see this diversity reflected in the range of future ready ideas presented in posts throughout the week.  We hope our posts will spark some thought and conversation and, of course, your comments. Most of all, we want to help keep the spark of the FutureReady blog alive  – a spark that’s become a fire, gathering us around it to brainstorm our way into the future. — Mary Talley, DC/SLA President (2011)

by Kee Malesky, NPR Library, Washington, DC Chapter, News Division

I can’t take credit for it myself, but I have observed NPR as it transitioned from typewriters to computers, and changed our method of distribution from feeding analog sound over landlines or mailing tapes to member stations to uploading digital audio files to satellites and content depots.

In the NPR library, many things have evolved over the years. Newspapers were clipped and filed for three decades; now we have electronic access to more than a century of news stories. From a collection of about 3000 print titles, we’re down to a few dozen books (mostly kept for sentimental value; in case of computer outages; or for the few paper-loving staffers who remain), but we still can access just about all of the same material in new formats. Our print journal collection is smaller, but our access to articles is greatly increased.

NPR’s first in-house program database was a simple records management program modified by one of our IT staffers. We created brief catalog records for all the radio programs, plus the music and spoken word collections. In the early 1990s, that was replaced by a web-based integrated library system we named Techlib, which has now reached its limits. Our new audio and transcript archives database is called Artemis, and it will contain all of NPR’s programming collection back to 1971. This new database allows the archival metadata to be integrated with other news and web production systems around NPR. The software behind Artemis uses an open source product called Collective Access. Librarians developed an innovative transcript template that makes automated data extraction via XML possible for the first time. Over the next year, we are planning to eliminate physical formats within the archive by implementing a “born-digital” archival workflow for the NPR programming collection, according to our librarian-designer, Janel White Kinlaw.
When I first started working as a librarian at NPR in the mid-1980s, we used to imagine, while entering metadata for a story into Techlib, how cool it would be if you could just press a button and hear the actual audio. I didn’t think that could happen in my lifetime, but we’re just about there now – news programs from 2003 to the present are just a few clicks away from any desktop.

We continue to take advantage of the wonders of technology wherever we find them: I have spoken to librarians and library students via webcam in Poland, Oklahoma (two campuses simultaneously), Alabama, and Canada. For NPR’s coverage of the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize, I was able to watch the live webcast from home (it was 5 a.m. Eastern time!), search biographical and news databases and the NPR archives, and send material to our reporter in London and his editor in the DC office. Other NPR librarians are digitizing our collections, building databases for our Investigative Reporting Unit, and working with commercial vendors to make more of our radio and web material available.

Maybe they didn’t use the term “future ready” forty years ago, but NPR has always been on the cutting edge of quality news and cultural programming, and the librarians have always been ready and able to support that in any way possible. This is an exciting time for the NPR librarians, because the network has trusted us to draft our own future; we have responded by pro-actively assessing the company’s needs and creating paths aligned to NPR’s goals.

Kee Malesky has worked at NPR for 32 years, as a librarian since 1984. She is the author of All Facts Considered (Wiley, 2010) and the forthcoming Learn Something New Every Day (Wiley, 2012).

Hello from the nation’s capital!  DC/SLA is excited to be contributing all of this week’s FutureReady365 posts (thanks to our future-thinking Communications Secretary, Chris Vestal).  We are a diverse community of 800+ information professionals, with members from D.C., Maryland, Virginia, as well as 30 other U.S. states and 12 countries.  You’ll see this diversity reflected in the range of future ready ideas presented in posts throughout the week.  We hope our posts will spark some thought and conversation and, of course, your comments. Most of all, we want to help keep the spark of the FutureReady blog alive  – a spark that’s become a fire, gathering us around it to brainstorm our way into the future. — Mary Talley, DC/SLA President (2011)

by Mary Talley, Washington, DC and Maryland Chapters, Business & Finance, Information Technology, Knowledge Management, Legal, and Leadership & Management Divisions

It was a wonderful life. When I started out, libraries and librarians were the only information game in town. Books held the answers and we held the books. There was no question that our work supported our organizations in crucial and irreplaceable (if not always measurable) ways. We were sure of our value: they (formerly known as “patrons”) needed us to identify, organize and maintain the sources and get at the data. These were powerful, valuable positions. It was a wonderful life.

Then… Well, you know the rest. The competition arrived and with it the temptation of the low-hanging fruit of good-enough information that forced us to rethink our place and value in this ever-evolving, 2.0 information world. To complicate life further, technological change and the competition it brings with it isn’t coming in fits and spurts – it’s rapid and continuous.

But wait a minute – was our old place in the information world really all that wonderful? Did we drive our organizations back then, tending the gates of knowledge; or, were we really in adjunct, transactional roles? If our positions did not allow us to be active participants in driving our organizations’ goals and objectives, we were – and are – adjuncts in our organizations. In a self-serve, peer-to-peer, 2.0 information world, as long as we hold adjunct roles, we will remain at the periphery of the organization and continually challenged to prove our value.

What can we do to be truly future ready? Move the conversation away from “proving value” to being valuable and trade in our transactional roles for those that are directly involved in the high-value work of our organizations. Moving information professionals out of libraries and embedding them in user communities provides a path to that direct involvement. Embedding trades in the service-provider role for one as a team member accountable for the outcomes.

The rise of a highly-interactive, information environment is opening the way for embedded information professionals, as much as it is making these new roles imperative. Collaboration, immediacy, accessibility, the disintegration of boundaries, and a new emphasis on relationships – this is the 2.0 information world our user communities inhabit. This is what they expect when they seek information from technology or us. Luckily, these are also qualities associated with the provision of embedded information services.

Mary Talley heads TalleyPartners, an information management consulting firm specializing in strategic planning, repositioning and embedded information structures for information centers.  She currently serves as President of DC/SLA.

By Steven K. Frets, Wisconsin Chapter, Knowledge Management Division

Helen Partridge’s focus group study and scholarly article Becoming “Librarian 2.0”: The Skills, Knowledge, and Attributes Required by Library and Information Science Professionals in a Web 2.0 World (and Beyond) (Library Trends – Volume 59, Numbers 1-2, Summer 2010/Fall 2010, pp. 315-335) identified 8 primary themes to becoming a Librarian 2.0: technology, communication, teamwork, user focus, business savvy, evidence-based practice, learning & education, and certain personality traits. I would argue and expect that any librarian has these in mind and demonstrates them in practice. Nothing new here – books themselves are a technology, albeit an old-fashioned type. Librarians in institutions have been collaborating with other librarians since the early 1800s. John Dewey made an emphasis on user focus in the 1920s. So what’s changed in the 21^st century? How should I as a first-semester LIS graduate student adapt to be “Future Ready”? I posit three words as an answer: pace, direction, and flexibility.

The confluence of new technologies and dynamic leadership in the library community has fostered a challenging pace. So I’m thinking “Future Ready” is a paradox: I need to make change a constant. This is why I’m not narrowing my academic experience to a track. I hardily appreciate library school but have applied to go to an i-school in Austria for a semester in order to embrace the interdisciplinary aspect of this profession. My motto of “Future Readiness” is to stand straight and authoritatively as a second baseman (ie. with the knowledge and ethics of a librarian) but always look to steal for 3^rd. Change gets you farther, after all. So own it.

Steven Frets is a  31 year-old first-year graduate student at the School of Library and Information Studies-University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Before graduate school, he was a translator and educator. His main interest is in corporate librarianship.  He interned at the Greendale Public Library and volunteers at the Milwaukee County Historical Society and Milwaukee Central Library. He speaks three languages and hopes to learn a fourth while in Austria. 

by Jason Griffey
Reposted with permission from http://jasongriffey.net

I had the pleasure of presenting to the librarians at Western Kentucky University during their 2011 kickoff event. When discussing a topic with the Dean, I was told that they were interested in the future of the academic library, technology, and how to manage the changes that are coming. That’s definitely in the sweet spot of my library interests, so I gave it a shot. Below you’ll find a slideshow with accompanying audio of my presentation, along with the Q/A session at the end. The whole thing is about 1.5 hours, but my presentation is just the first hour or so. I’d love to hear what you think, especially if you disagree with any of my points.

The Future is Already Here from Jason Griffey on Vimeo.

Jason Griffey, the Head of Library Information Technology at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, is busy blogging and publishing. Read more about him here.