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February 13, 2009 | Vol. 2, No. 6 | ISSN: 1943-1457
Above the Fold
A weekly newsletter for the changing world of libraries, archives and museums

In this issue:

- Blue is the New Green: Blue Thinking, the Gen 2 Sustainability Strategy
- Laugh a Little, Innovate a Lot
- Knowledge Management
- The Interview Question You Should Always Ask
- Do You Value Your Social Capital?
- User-Generated Content Draws Fans

## Blue is the New Green: Blue Thinking, the Gen 2 Sustainability Strategy

PSFK • January 29, 2009

Green is good, but blue is even better. "Blue innovation" refers to the nascent movement toward "embracing sustainability as a business strategy." When we think about the future, how can we become Blue Thinkers by building environmental sustainability into our everyday business practices?

I hadn't heard this phrase before. I wonder whether it will catch on? It does capture the need to move beyond appeals to citizenship and the global family in positioning sustainability. (Michalko)

## Laugh a Little, Innovate a Lot

Business Week • January 27, 2009

Pay attention to laughter. In an atmosphere that's fraught with tension, very little creative thinking goes on. But fun is the antidote to fear, so it's up to managers to infuse the workplace with a little levity. One place to start—how about a nine-minute daily huddle? Management expert Verne Hanish says, "When companies embrace the huddle, we always see a positive impact to their bottom line and culture."

Loosening up is just fine and informality feeds a flow of information that technology can't replicate. It doesn't excuse us from structure and discipline in the creation of our agendas and the management of our collective time together. (Michalko))

## Knowledge Management

The Economist • January 19, 2009

A checklist on knowledge management. The value of knowledge management in wealth creation is well-documented, but managing knowledge means more than just installing collaborative software and filling up databases. The four activities listed at the end of this article serve as a handy checklist for how well we're doing in each category.

This is a phrase that is used differently in the LAM domain. In the business environment, it has a very specific set of activities associated with it. For me, it's most interesting to consider whether we present our data in a way that allows it to easily become part of these activities. (Michalko)

## The Interview Question You Should Always Ask

Harvard Business Publishing • January 27, 2009

Find your future stars. How do you distinguish a great hire from someone who's merely adequate? The traditional interview process is designed to elicit information on past achievements, which leads to identifying past stars rather than future ones. So how do you look beyond a resum� and find the inner passion that spells future success?

The author suggests a good question that shouldn't be left out of interviews. It's always easy to find questions that will disqualify a candidate and much harder to find those that will assure you've found the right one. (Michalko)

## Do You Value Your Social Capital?

Social Computing Magazine • February 2, 2009

Social networking as more than an add-on. This article offers some good advice on how to integrate social networking in the workplace in a way that encourages people to use it and enables the organization to derive fundamental (if as yet unmeasurable) value from those interactions.

At least this article acknowledges the predominant desire among professionals to keep their work and personal identities separate. These don't necessarily merge comfortably and, therefore, leveraging the standard social networking environments in the workplace is unlikely. Creating a different environment for the professional interaction, however, diminishes the power and utility of being resident in a single place. The power may be there but the place for it seems to me to still be uncertain. (Michalko)

## User-Generated Content Draws Fans

eMarketer • February 3, 2009

Blogging gets top billing. What does it mean for scholarship when six out of 10 Internet users—a larger percentage than those involved in social networking sites—are focusing on user-generated content?

Lorcan passed on a thought from a book he was reading in which the author complains about the difficulty of getting anything across on television because the content has to be prepared for rapid consumption. Accordingly, the most successful people are those that communicate what has already been received, and do it quickly. It may be that quite a bit of blogging falls into this sort of category—writing that sounds as if it is responding to the current situation but just shuffles stuff. That's what gets top billing. (Michalko)

News and Views

- Popular Authors and What People Read
- A Signed Network Presence: People as Entry Points Again
- SEI—Search Engine Interoperability
- More on Repositories and Search Engines
- Appreciating the Paradox of Artists' Books
- The Distributed Centre: A Museum of Britishness
- Optimisers, One and All—Report from the 9th International Bielefeld Conference in Germany

More news ››

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- RLG Programs 2009 Annual Partner Meeting, 1–3 June 2009 in Boston

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Above the Fold is a Web-based newsletter published by OCLC Programs and Research. It has been developed to serve a broad international readership from libraries, archives and museums. News items are supplied weekly under contract by Suzanne Douglas, Ibis Communications Inc. Programs and Research items are supplied by staff in RLG Programs and OCLC Research. Please send comments and questions about this or other issues to rlg@oclc.org.

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