“‘Get over it’ and Experiment”

by Marc Segers
I managed to escape the CQ Press booth at PLA in Minneapolis last week just in time to catch Michael Stephens and Jen Maney’s amazing talk on Web 2.0. And for the rest of the conference, the plane ride home, and now back at my desk one phrase is stuck in my head.

“Throw out the culture of perfect”

For years now, I and a number of my comrades at CQ Press have talked about creating a blog for the CQ Researcher. CQ Researcher has even published a report on blogs (subscription required) in 2006. Great ideas for blogs have come and slipped away after a chorus of the following questions. Do these sound familiar?

• Question 1: Who will write the blog? Who has time?

• Question 2: Will anybody read it?

• Question 3: Will it do everything or anything we really want it to do?

• Question 4: Who has the time to even think about this?

Jen Maney urged librarians at PLA to “Get over it….Experiment.. . .Play . . . It's what your users are doing already.” It’s time for CQ Press to finally put that well established culture of perfect in our back pocket and begin to experiment, play, and interact with our users.

“The library is participatory” as Michael Stephens proclaims. The mission of this blog is to open CQ Researcher up to be more participatory. What topics should we cover in the coming months? What’s your opinion on the latest pro/con question? What ideas do you have for making CQ Researcher better? We will share some of the behind-the-scenes, sausage-making that goes into CQ Researcher. And we will blog about how a current news story or an issue in library land remind of a long lost CQ Researcher report? But most importantly we will play.

Let us know what you think.
Email me at cqresearcherblog@cqpress.com