Bits and Pieces; "Managing for Results"

News October 26, 2007 (mp3 file: 6.49 MB, 6:55 min.)
Bits and Pieces; "Managing for results"

Today I’d just like to remind you of a few things going on and coming up.

First, the LSA Early Childhood Literacy Initiative is underway. Marcia and Sue have been working on storytime kits for you to use, and there are 5 complete kits, ready to go. Remember, each of these kits contain what you need to do a storytime featuring one of the 6 specific developmental skills, such as print awareness or letter recognition. These storytimes aren’t so different from those you are doing now, they just add a couple of things for parents or caregivers, and they have that specific focus. Because these kits will be available statewide we’re asking that you use them not for the traditional storytimes but if you plan to do those couple of extra things—such as short asides to parents about the skill you’re focusing on and why it’s important, and take-home sheets for parents. It’s not difficult, and the kits are designed to support you in doing that.

There are two kits that are more for the lapsit crowd: “Moonbeams” and “Bounce Me.” The others are for 2-3 year olds. And they’re just darn cute!

We’re working on kits to loan to parents and daycare providers, and Sue is also working on some bi-lingual kits. The kits are listed on the Early Childhood Literacy website, and most of the contents of each kit are also downloadable from there. Call SWILSA to borrow the kits, or check the website for downloads.

We’re also asking you to keep some statistics for us. (Yes, more stats!!) We’d like to know how many people attend your ECL storytimes, and how you use the awareness materials, such as the posters and table tents. For example, Creston let us know that they used the table tents and posters at the county literacy forum, attended by about 150 people. Sue said they wished they had made several table tents for each table, as people were reading and commenting on them. That helps us to evaluate the initiative, as well as give us ideas for how to help you more in the future.

Secondly, please remember to keep checking our CE page (and your e-mail box) for upcoming CE events. We have several workshops coming up in the online Wimba classroom, as well as a couple ICN sessions—one for trustees, as a matter of fact. You can find them on our CE page, or on rolling 30-day calendar on SWILSA’s home page. (You could have your own rolling calendar on YOUR library’s website, by the way. If you want to know how, give me a call or an IM and we’ll get that done for you!) -Karen

Links from today's podcast:

Iowa LSAs' Early Childhood Literacy website
SWILSA's CE page
SWILSA's home page

Book reviewed by Marcia:
Managing for results: effective resource allocation for public libraries, by Sandra Nelson, Ellen Altman and Diane Mayo. ALA, c2000

Reading Incentives; Early Childhood Literacy Resources; "Books, Babies and Libraries"

News October 19, 2007 (mp3 file: 6.22 MB, 6:38 min.)
Reading Incentives; Early Childhood Literacy Resources; "Books, Babies and Libraries"

At the top of the ‘cast today: reading incentives.

Earlier this week I received a catalog from Heifer International, an organization that gives animals, such as heifers, goats, pigs, llamas and chickens, to needy families in the U.S. and throughout the world. They also provide training in animal management and, in the spirit of passing it on and growing the gift, families give offspring of the animals to other families, or perhaps of a percentage of production goes to a local orphanage.

What does this have to do with reading incentives? As I read stories about the individuals, families and villages that have benefited from Heifer’s program a recurrent theme was children who are now able to afford to go to school, and to buy the pencils and paper needed. One girl, whose widowed mother sold the milk from a goat she had received described her first day of school, and said it was the happiest day of her life. A young man whose mother had died now has a heifer and sale of the milk enabled him to send his younger siblings to school. (Heifer does a tremendous job of telling their story, and we could take some cues from them, but that’s another subject.) I began to look through the “Get involved” section of the website and found “Read to Feed,” and this is where reading incentives come in. As a fundraiser, they suggest that children find sponsors for their reading—sections of reading, or minutes, or whatever—and the money they raise goes toward buying a heifer or goat or llama…..Libraries give t-shirts and pencils and other incentives to encourage kids to read; why not a different sort of incentive, one that helps others? Heifer has curriculum for 3^rd and 4^th grade, so it would make a good collaborative project with the school. Teens might do it, also—they are perhaps more aware of their global citizenship than some of us in earlier generations, and they are looking for ways to serve the community and make a difference. Maybe you would choose another cause, a local organization or charity instead of Heifer. But what a great opportunity to participate in the increasingly global community of ours, and “pass it on.” --Karen

Links from today's podcast:

Heifer International
Read to Feed
Early Childhood Literacy website

Book reviewed by Marcia:
Books, babies and libraries: serving infants, toddlers, their parents and their caregivers, by Ellin Greene. ALA, c1991.

New All Iowa Reads Book

Digging to America, by Anne Tyler

News & Views October 12, 2007

News October 12, 2007 (mp3 file, 4:05 min.)




Book Reviewed by Marcia This Week:
Excellence in Library Services to Young Adults by Mary K. Chelton

A few "Books About Books" (borrow through SILO interlibrary loan!):

So Many Books, So Little Time by Sara Nelson. Nelson's entertaining look at the experience of reading -- Why does a book suddenly grab you the third time you pick it up? Does the setting in which you are reading change the book's impact? -- would make for interesting discussions for a book club.

Bound to Please by Michael Dirda. A collection of essays by the Pulitzer Prize winner who many consider to be the best book critic in the country.

The Book Group Book by Ellen Slezak offers lots of book club ideas. In particular, it will help your group choose a theme to make its discussions more interesting (and allow members to read different books at the same time!).

Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi. This book includes discussions of works by Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry Miller, etc. If you look up this book on Amazon, you will find a list of all 47 books mentioned by Nafisi.

Confessions of a Common Reader by Anne Fadiman.

The Most Wonderful Books: Writers on Discovering the Pleasures of Reading by Michael Dorris.

Reading in Bed by Steven Gilbar.

Ruined by Reading: A Life in Books by Lynne Sharon Schwartz.

Friday at the conference

GENERAL SESSION; Stephen ABram, a futurist from Sirsi-Dynix, is speaking "Social Libraries: the 2.0 Phenomenon." Libraries are important-studies are prvving what we've long known. Content isn't king--if it were, there would be long lines at libraries because we have so much content. *Context* is king--social context, community context, etc. We build websites and libraries and services around what we do well (read) but only 20% of our users have reading as a learning style.

What does it all mean, this 20 stuff? We have gone from communication-based web and are moving into context-based web, where socal context matters. If we don't use the technologies that he young are using we become irrelevant to them. We're at a tipping point, and change is going to come very quickly.

Abram articulates well what we've been talking about for some time; a good summary for what continues to be ahead for us is a traffic sign in Paris: "Changed Priorities Ahead," with a sign below it: "No stopping allowed." THings are changing fast, and sometimes we miss patterns when they change rapidly. We need to pay attention, and be there; be where your users are. Make it local.

More and more is online--books, journals, information. Google may work for many "who, what, where" questions but we librarians need to help them with "How" and "Why" questions.

TECH-SAVVY BOOKTALKS
blogs, wikis [do you begin to see a pattern??]
Powerpoint books talks (old library as a kiosk with ppts on it; sends to public access channel)
podcast (post them, and put them into the library's catalog)
PhotoStory
[We have had classes and/or tutorials for all of these--see our CE page: http://www.swilsa.lib.ia.us/CE/Online.htm]
Voice Thread
Video booktalks (by teens, too!)

Hi to Southwest

I have enjoyed visiting with everyone from Southwest and hope that those who are not at ILA are doing well. I have been homesick but am enjoying Central Iowa. Take care and I hope to see you soon.
Sarah Willeford

Thursday at the conference

It's been a long, busy day!

Author Chris Crutcher was the keynote speaker, and there is no way I can do his presentation justice. One of the key points was at the end, when he talked about intellectual freedom and kids and teens, and their emotioanal development. Some say the want to protect teens but they really are preventing them from talking about issues and questions they (or their friends) are dealing with. Books can help them, if they can find a haracter who is like them, or can speak to them when no one else will talk about it, then they don't feel so alone. When we censor books about topics that teens are facing or have questions about then we are telling them that those feelings or questions aren't important, that they aren't important.

I did 2 presentations so can't objectively make observations about them, but I did attend a session on boomers and their future in and for libraries. I'm going to have to absorb and do more reading and followup. An institute that she talked about sounds enticing....I'll have to see.

Off to the banquet; more tomorrow. -Karen

Awards at ILA conference--one of our own!

The Iowa Library Trustee of the Year Award goes to John Teget, former SWILSA trustee! Congratulations, John!

Mary Jo Langhorne received the ILA Member of the Year. Mary Jo has been instrumental in all good things that are happening with school libraries in the state. Congratulations to Mary Jo, too!

Hello from Sharman!

Hello everyone! I'm back at least temporarily (I'm at the ILA conference in Coralville.) I can't tell you how good it is to be here! I am hearing very good things about all of you and the things you are doing, but I am not surprised! You always do good things. Iowa will always have a very special place in my heart! I can only hope that anyone coming to MS would be made to feel as at home as you have made me. Continue to do good work and know my heart will always be with you.

ILA Conference: Preconference: "Blog and Pony Show"

Louise Alcorn, Reference Technology Librarian at West Des Moines Public LIbrary, always does a great job—seh's thorough, shows many examples, is very practical, and can give you all the nitty-gritty you need for doing...whatever!.

Of course, I’m going to look at it from the Library 2.0 / social perspective, and blogs are an easy way for a library to get started—and with Blogger, it’s free! Louise pointed out all the reasons to have a blog. The conversation and PR aspects are the key pieces (for me) of what Louise discussed. The style is more conversational; it's easily updated; you can “feed” the blog info to your users on your website—or to their disktop in an aggregator; comments allow you to interact with your readers. Don’t be afraid of comment! Uusers self-censor, and other users will “police” others; Ann Arbot DL has had over 4,000 comments and nly one or two inappropriate words—and other users said, “No, we don’t do hits on the blog.” If the comments are negative or critical you have a chance to respod and talk with users immediately, rather than having those comments out in the community and you don’t hear about them until damage has been done. Blogs build an online community in a way that a static website can't. You allow users to come and talk to you in their comfort zone, in their space

The thing libraries should fear about blogging, I think, is success! It’s important that you keep the blog up to date, and allow that conversation with your users. Then the sky is pretty much the limit—and even that is becoming less limiting as technology advances and more options become available on these free services such as Blogger. Let people comment, talk to your users, let your staff talk to your users in a blog. The library is theirs, after all. Converse with others in the community, let them know what you’re doing with their taxes. Let them talk with you.

RSS can be used to bring information from blogs directly to your desktop (using an aggregator) or to republish on a website. This has many uses for a library--library news items, new books, calendars...all can be delivered to your users' desktops, or "plugged into" the library website. We use several feeds (or sometimes widgets, really, but close enough for our purposes) on the SWILSA website: our Sites of the Week, the rolling 30 day calendar, and the photos of our member libraries are all "fed" to the website from other blogs or sites. It keeps your website fresh without having to continually update the page manually.

Online Conference; "Serving Families and Children through Partnerships"

News October 5, 2007 (mp3 file:4.15 MB, 4:32 min.)
Online conference; "Serving Families and Children through Partnerships"

On January 16, Southwest and Northwest LSAs will sponsor an online conference for small libraries. Knowing that librarians from smaller communities often find it difficult, if not impossible, to attend ILA, PLA, or ALA conferences we are planning to provide that opportunity virtually. (Many of you will be able to attend the ILA conference this year for the Libraries on the Prairie Reunion, which is a great opportunity; this is yet another opportunity, one that we hope to continue in future years .)

This first year the conference will be one day, from 8:30 am to 3:00 p.m., with a break for the after school rush and some dinner (and maybe on line demo or two), then there will be an evening session for trustees. Each hour time slot will feature 3 concurrent sessions, including one session each time with some demonstrations of software or services that have been discussed during other sessions, and that libraries might find useful.

Many of the topics are about technology and Library 2.0—how to communicate with your patrons online and RSS feeds, for example—but others will have less focus on technology: time management, for example. (Though I’m sure the presenter will give you some ideas for using technology to help you manage your time.)

We’re also planning a Virtual Exhibits Hall, and a lounge area where you can go and “network” with your fellow conference-goers. We have a dynamite keynote speaker lined up, but we don’t have his signature on a contract yet so we won’t announce it in print just yet.

All of this will be happening online, of course, in Wimba classrooms. For those who haven’t attended a class or session in the Wimba room yet there will be orientations of various sorts, so you’re ready to go, and hit the conference venue running!

Be looking for more details about the conference in the next few weeks. And, if you want to get your feet wet with online learning, take a look at our online classes, listed on our online CE webpage, and join us for a Computerside Chat, a RACE session, the e-rate series, or PowerPoint II. See you in the Wimba room! --Karen

Links from today's podcast:

SWILSA's Online CE webpage

Book reviewed by Marcia:

Serving families and children through partnerships, by Sandra Feinberg and Sari Feldman. Neal-Schuman, c1996.