My service to the university and to the library largely has taken the form of instruction in the use of various digitally based information retrieval and storage technologies. The reasons for this are twofold: I enjoy teaching and am good at it and faculty (both teaching and non teaching) can benefit from making better use of the information technologies accessible to them via WIU Libraries or the Internet. WIU spends tens of thousands of dollars a year on very powerful and content rich proprietary information technologies such as First Search, JSTOR, Ebsco, and Lexis (to name but a few). These technologies have transformed, and continue to transform, the way research is done. Yet, factulty don’t employ these technologies to their full advantage. This is understandable. Teaching faculty spend their days preparing lectures, conducting or overseeing research, writing grants, etc. They don’t have time to master the arcana of information retrieval. That’s what librarians do—and where I come in. For example, I give a workshop that teaches faculty how to add dynamic content to their web pages. Voyager, InfoTrac, First Search, Ebsco, JSTOR and the OED online all have the ability to create persistent links to their various content. Using these links, faculty can create dynamic bibliographies, or links to definitions of key concepts, to support their teaching curricula. Moreover, some databases (Ebsco, Voyager, and InfoTrac, for instance) allow not only articles but entire search strategies to be persistantly linked. This creates the possibility for a what amounts to a current contents service, e.g. if a faculty member wants to track the Wall Street Journal’s coverage of the scandals at Enron or WorldCom, it is not difficult to create, and preserve, a search strategy that will produce that information at the click of a mouse. Likewise, Google, the world’s largest archive of the Internet, offers the possibility of preserving search strategies or of searching its archives for only for relevant sites listed in the last 24 hours. Finally, these persistent links can be used in a blog, a web based publishing technology whose popularity is exploding on the Internet. Blogs, short for “web logs,” allow the intimacy and immediacy of a diary or journal to combine with the plenipotentcy of the Internet. Creating any, or all of these, is not difficult. You only need to know that it can be done and how to do it. Hence, the need for this kind of service to the university. The workshops play a similar role within the library. Databases are not stable entities. Lexis recently underwent a significant redesign. First Search regularly adds or drops features and so on. And the library purhases new databases that have their own advantages and limitations. The Internet offers a staggering, and maddeningly fluid, amount of information—and disinformation. If the library is to be of good service to the university and the larger community its faculty and staff must always be learning new skills and refining old ones. Encouraging this encounter with the new, and re-encounter with the old, is the role the library’s Professional Growth Committee, which I now chair. Most of my internal sessions focus on databases. For, as I continually teach the use of the various databases to students, I am in a good position to be conversant with technological niceties of, say, Google. My colleagues have expertise that lie elsewhere and the Professional Growth Committee’s sessions will be richer for it.