February, 2010

For those of you who have never visited (or heard of) a virtual conference, let me set the scene:  hundreds of librarians huddle in front of PCs in their homes and small libraries across Iowa on a particularly freezing January day with coffee in hand.  All are about to take part in a conference, without going anywhere.  Keynoters Sarah Houghton-Jan and George Needham bookend the day while breakout sessions, poster sessions and even a virtual exhibit hall give every attendee the full conference experience – all without travel, or cost. 

I'm learning to tweet as part of my work with TS for Libraries...we are TechSoup4Libs, if you'd like to follow us! I love that libraries are using this tool to market their services and reach out to their community members. As reported by NFI Research, these are the top public libraries active on twitter who regularly communicate with their community and have a proportionate number of followers to following. Interesting that there aren't many listed on the West Coast.

Chris Anderson's (Wired Magazine’s editor-in-chief and author of The Long Tail) articles are always worth reading, but his latest: “In the Next Industrial Revolution, Atoms Are the New Bits," is especially interesting in its implications for libraries and librarians.

February's library spotlight is on Jarvis Sims, Technology Services Manager of the Hall County Library System in Gainesville, Georgia. Jarvis shares invaluable lessons learned from his experiences managing existing branches and planning for the construction of a new building. Read his spotlight and check out his tips. Thanks for sharing with us, Jarvis!

Last week our good friend, astute colleague and soon-to-be-mom Brenda Hough forwarded two articles that made me think about the role that libraries play in their communities during tough economic time.

Thursday of last week I was disappointed when I realized that I had missed  the Tuesday/Wednesday Technology Essentials online conference organized by WebJunction (fortunately, recordings are available), so my good friend and colleague Brenda Hough gave me her invitation to the ALA TechSource’s TechTrends: MidWinter 2010 webinar featuring short presentations by Jason Griffey, Sean Fitzpatrick, Greg Landgraf and Kate Sheehan. Each of these well-informed and observant speakers gave their unique perspective on the technology trends they saw emerging at the ALA MidWinter Conference in Boston.

I am the back room of a small rural library in Colorado. OK I am actually a person, but working in a small (did I mention understaffed) library means my job is all things associated with the back room: cataloging, accounting, book processing, acquisitions, technology, toilet plunging... Yup. Jack of all trades.

WebJunction's Online Conference, Technology Essentials 2010, has begun today! I'm presenting Winning Grants tomorrow, and really looking forward to it. I just checked the tweets and sounds like it is going great. I also peaked into Pat Carterette's session on Learning When There's No Time (or Money) to Learn.

Teaching, learning and research have always been social activities involving heavy reliance on trust, reputation and brand awareness., and these social aspects of information seeking behavior grow more prevalent every year. This natural tendency to seek reliable, community-validated information sources has traditionally drawn people to libraries for two reasons.

News about an update to Google Reader can’t compete with the buzz surrounding the launch of the iPad, but any feature that helps us mitigate information overload is good news in my opinion, especially if you happen to be a reference librarians or an information junkie.