Infoblog

Archive for the ‘Keeping Up’ Category

I know, I’m usually plugging an Infopeople podcast, but today I’m plugging this great interview on T Is for Training with our own (well, she’s her own person, but we love her) Sarah Houghton-Jan aka the Librarian in Black. Sarah has a new book coming out, and is also going to be teaching a new online course for Infopeople (check out the description and sign up here). Sarah has lots of hopeful words for libraries and good advice for keeping up with new stuff – oh, and figuring out how to find a balance between work life and home life.

In this edition of Thinking Out Loud, George and Joan continue the conversation about Taiga Forum that they started in their last podcast. This time around they focus on the Forum statements that look at what the library as an institution may be like in the future. And exactly how do you pronounce Taiga?

From the press release:

Through a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), WebJunction, the online learning community for library staff created by OCLC, a nonprofit library service and research organization; and the State Library of North Carolina (SLNC) have launched a one-year initiative to gather and share best practices for providing library-based employment services and programs to the unemployed.

Read all about it here.

For some good ideas now, listen to these podcasts from Libraries to the Rescue on ideas for helping your patrons in tough times. Be sure to check out Infopeople’s workshop, Helping Your Job-Seeking Patrons Thrive During Challenging Times, as well (an online version of this workshop is in development!).

In this podcast, George & Joan start a three-part series discussing a checklist they’ve developed on strategic thinking. As they presented their Infopeople workshop on Strategic Thinking, they developed a set of questions they decided libraries needed to ask when allocating resources. This set of questions has developed into a strategic opportunity checklist that they will be discussing during this and their next two podcasts. This first podcast looks at the question, “Will it show?” In tough times, you need to get credit for what you are doing right. So you need to make sure that our stakeholders can SEE what you are doing. Listen as George and Joan discuss how best to go about doing this.

An intriguing video looks at how we thought in the 20th century and compares it to how we are thinking in the 21st century. It’s pretty exciting in its potential!

A new Pew Internet publication looks at how Americans use social network sites like Twitter to keep friends, family and/or total strangers updated about their lives. As of Dec 2008, 11% of online American adults have used a microblogging service like Twitter. Not surprisingly, age has a lot to do with who “tweets.” From the publication’s summary:

“Twitter and similar services have been most avidly embraced by young adults.3 Nearly one-in-five (19%) online adults ages 18 to 24 have ever used Twitter and its ilk, as have 20% of online adults ages 25 to 34. Use of these services drops off steadily after age 35 with 10% of 35-to-44 year-olds and 5% of those ages 45 to 54 using Twitter. The decline is even more stark among older internet users; 4% of 55-to-64 year olds and 2% of those age 65 and older use Twitter.

You can follow Infopeople at infotweets.

This isn’t new, but it’s still interesting. I ran across this test the other day when I was on the Pew Internet & American Life Project website: the Internet Typology Test. I’m an omnivore. Reading the description, I think I need to get a life.

In this latest edition of Thinking Out Loud, George and Joan take a look at a recent Pew Internet presentation, How libraries can survive in the new media ecosystem. As George points out, the Pew Internet & American Life Project has been around long enough gathering data that they can now identify distinct trends – which makes them a treasure trove of valuable information for libraries.

In this Thinking Out Loud podcast, George and Joan take a look at the final report (PDF) from the Metropolitan Library System in Illinois’ LSTA grant project The Customer Focused Library. Among the findings:

• Only one third of the people who come into a library stop at a service desk
• Two thirds of the people who come into a library have no idea what they came in for

George and Joan find much to discuss about these and other findings of the report. Listen and learn!

Okay, ONE of the best careers for 2009, according to U.S. News & World Report. Read all about it here. Here’s the article’s idea of a day in the life:

You work in a small municipal library, where you have to do a little of everything. You start your day by leafing through catalogs from online database publishers and book reviews in Library Journal to decide which titles to add to your collection. Next, it’s out to the reference desk, where visitors regularly ask how to find something. Sometimes, it’s esoteric; often, it’s the bathroom. Later, you teach a class: an advanced lesson in Googling. Next, it’s back to the reference desk, but you’re soon interrupted by a group of boisterous kids, so you have to turn into schoolmarm: “You’ll have to be quiet, or I’ll have to ask you to leave.” You end your day reading about “automated librarianship”: data storage systems that let the public get needed resources without the help of a live librarian. Tomorrow, you decide, you’ll start writing a grant proposal to develop a computer kiosk that will help patrons find health information.

Hmm.