This past Tuesday, July 29, 2014, we had the honor of hosting the Summer B.E.S.T. meeting where librarians from all types of institutions around the Huntsville area visited and talked about plans and swapped conference stories and ideas and asked questions about related services and so forth. It was a delight, and we look forward to the next one.

As part of the meeting, Michael Manasco and I (me = Doug Bolden) gave a presentation about feedback loops with the twist of looking at how it can be personal. What does good versus bad feedback mean to us as professionals? How is it that sometimes negative feedback can be a good thing while positive feedback can be bad? What are the biggest dangers to consider? What are the strengths or weaknesses of some feedback systems? That sort of thing. And then we talked about a few of the basic case studies that we have personally dealt with, along with some discussion questions that hopefully helped to broaden the topic and see a few perspectives. We had a good discussion about some of the factors of the talk…even if we went a smidgen over time.

For those who attended, and for those who did not, our presentation is below. Feel free to read and comment upon it!

You can download a PDF of “Where Feedback Fears to Tread” and use as you wish. We have released it under Creative Commons 4.0 International License (i.e. cc-by). Yes, this means you can feel free to adapt portions of it and to share it. We promise we don’t mind. If you do use it, you can drop us a line to let us know how, but that’s just so we can see how people respond to it. Note, a couple of the slides have been slightly altered to help put them into context outside of the vocal portion of the presentation. The gist is still the same in all cases, though.

For those into such things, we also have a few pictures from the event (you can see a couple in this post already). Browse the slideshow below for more. If you were there, and have some pictures you would like to share, you can send them to me at doug.bolden@uah.edu. I can add them to our gallery, below, and credit you are or I can not, as your preference.