Seeking contributors for a new Against the Grain column: "How We Done It Bad"

["Rick Anderson" <rickand@unr.edu>]

* Please excuse cross-posting *

All of us are familiar with the "How We Done It Good" article, a 
piece in which a librarian writes about a project that he or she 
has recently completed successfully.  Sometimes the successful 
projects involve refinements of old practices and workflows, and 
sometimes they are experimental new practices that have proved 
effective.  In both cases, the point of the article is to share 
the good news and the details with colleagues, who might be 
inspired to try something similar in their own institutions.

For a new column, to be published irregularly in _Against the 
Grain_, I would like to invite submissions with an opposite 
orientation: the column will be called "How We Done It Bad," and 
it will feature stories of projects and experiments that went 
wrong -- maybe even horribly, tragically wrong.  The point of 
these articles won't be so much to provide amusement and/or 
provoke sympathy, but rather to share lessons learned.  How can 
_AtG_'s readers benefit from mistakes that all of us have made? 
Can we save each other some wasted time and embarrassment (or 
worse) by sharing our own stories of wasted time and 
embarrassment?

Please send ideas and proposals to me at the email address below. 
I look forward to hearing from you!

(And yes, if you'd prefer to publish your experience anonymously, 
that's a definite possibility.  However, please volunteer only 
your own stories -- not those of others who you feel have failed 
in some way.)

----
Rick Anderson
Dir. of Resource Acquisition
University of Nevada, Reno Libraries
rickand@unr.edu