Blogging Section of SLA-IT

Top 100 Librarian Tweeters

Just for fun, a list of the top 100 librarians, libraries and library-related organizations on Twitter. At position #69, the Blogging Section's own Jill Hurst-Wahl.

SLA Centennial Video contest

The finalists have been chosen and the vote has now begun for the SLA Centennial Video Contest http://www.sla.org/content/Events/centennial/video.cfm) .

The IT Division has an entry in the Professional category, visible here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fz4Psrv7rvc. The title of the video is "Be bold. Play. Keep at it." It was produced by Amy Buckland, Kendra Levine and Margaret Smith who did a fabulous job.

 

The voting ballot is here: http://bit.ly/a6Jxv. You must use your membership number to vote. I'm assuming you only get one vote per category so, if I may, I suggest you cast your ballot for "Be bold. Play. Keep at it." Voting ends March 25th.

UPDATE (from HQ)

• Voting will end on March 31, 2009, at 11:59pm (EDT).
• Winners will be announced on April 7, 2009.
• View the videos as much as you would like, but members may only vote once in each category.
• You will need your SLA membership ID to cast your ballot.  If you've forgotten yours, not to worry! Instructions on how to retrieve it are included on the voting ballot through the link above.
• In case of a tie in either category, members of the SLA Centennial Commission and Video Contest Sub-committee will choose the winner(s).

a quick introduction

Bonjour tout le monde!
I thought it was appropriate that my first post be a bit of an introduction.

I'm Amy. I'm a liaison librarian in the Howard Ross Library of Management at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec. I'm Canadian. I have a Second Life (as Jambina Oh). I read a lot of blogs. I believe knowledge requires collaboration. I play rugby. And I'm still in shock that I was named a Mover and Shaker by Library Journal in 2008.

I'm really honoured that Catherine and Nicole invited me to start blogging here and hope to get a lot of chat going on about the fun (and not-so-fun) things on the interwebs.

LibraryThing Hiring

Not only is LibraryThing hiring, but they'll pay you if you help them find a new employee!

Find us a Maine—or anyway within an hour of Portland, ME—employee and we'll give you $1,000 in books.

We did this once before. It's how we found John, our Systems Adminitrator. (John found himself, so he got his own $1,000.)

Jobs. We have three potential jobs to fill.

• Hacker. We're looking for PHP hacker. JavaScript genius and library-data experience. We hope we get two of those.
• Graphic designer/user-experience guru. Experience designing for data-rich sites like LibraryThing a must.
• Brainy, overworked assistant. Smart, flexible, organized, relentless—willing to do both high-level (strategic analysis) and low-level (send-out-these-CueCats) work. The job is non-technical, but you need to be super-comfortable around computers.

Rules! You get a $1,000 gift certificate to Abebooks, Amazon, Booksense or the independent bookseller of your choice. (Longfellow Books? Books Etc.?) You can split it between them. You don't need to buy books with it (but why do that?).

This is such a neat idea!!!  I don't know anyone in Maine - but maybe you do.  Learn more here.

Meme: Passion Quilt

We have been tagged in the Passion Quilt Meme.  I chose the picture above for my bit of the quilt because:

The thing I'd like kids to know is that you can teach an old dog new tricks.  If you have a love of learning, you can experience the comfort that comes with lifelong learning. If you go forward in life believing that you're going to reach an age where you can't learn anymore then you're going to find yourself in uncomfortable situations.  Instead, go forward in life with the goal of always learning something new!

3 Simple Meme Rules:

 

• Post a picture from a source like FlickrCC or Flickr Creative Commons or make/take your own that captures what YOU are most passionate about for kids to learn about…and give your picture a short title.
• Title your blog post “Meme: Passion Quilt” and link back to this blog entry. (Known origin of the meme is here)
• Include links to 5 folks in your professional learning network or whom you follow on Twitter/Pownce.

Tag! You Are It: I know that the SLA IT Division Bloggers have been tagged already, but there are many of us - and I'd love to hear from other members so you're all first on my list:

• SLA IT Division bloggers
• NJSLA Blog Members
• Christine Schwartz
• Tom Ipri
• John Blyberg

The Hollywood Librarian's financial predicament

Via LISNews:

Lynne writes: “Greetings to all librarians. I am Lynne Martin Erickson. I have been the fiscal agent for The Hollywood Librarian documentary film since 2004. I post this in the hope that librarians will respond immediately and repost widely.

As many of you know, this wonderful film is the result of the tireless efforts of one person: Ann Seidl. She single-handedly raised $200,000 to make and distribute this movie, worked on it for over 8 years and she is still working to get it seen by as many members of our public as possible. She is traveling throughout the US and the world to promote the film. Thanks to the librarian network, the film is being seen in dozens of locations by hundreds and even thousands of people.

While Ann has devoted her full-time work to this cause, she has been paid very little. She insists she is not in it for the money. I can guarantee that is the case. She wouldn’t say this to you, but I can assure you that Ann is broke.

During the Banned Book Week release, when tickets sold for $8, we took in about $10,000, but less than $400 was profit. These days, she is asking for a small fee to screen the film but that money is to fund the editing and authoring process for the DVD which she wants to make available this fall. But she must have some financial support to go on working on the film. We can’t let her stop working on the film to take other employment when she is so close to finishing.

If you are a fan of The Hollywood Librarian or of Ann, I am asking you to send her your financial encouragement.

Go here now http://www.hollywoodlibrarian.com/involved.html and click on the Paypal link.”

I never got to see the movie and have been looking for the DVD - I’m happy to hear that it’s in production and hope that we can help this movie make it to the masses!!

Are you a leader?

Somehow with all of the busyness in my life I missed the announcement about the new PALINET Leadership Network page.  This from Walt Crawford:

Take a look at the PALINET Leadership Network (PLN). It’s an international network to provide resources and share ideas among library leaders (present and future) of all varieties. It’s free, it’s open to anyone who believes they belong, and it’s off to a good start–with just under more than 300 users and some 200,000 words of content already in place.

What I love - is that they're considering out busy lives and allowing us to keep up with updates in more than one way.  As a wiki you can of course "watch" pages and receive updates via RSS or email, but Walt is also helping us out:

We also know that most leaders (and would-be leaders) are busy people, who don’t have time to go check a wiki every week or two to see what’s new. With that in mind, we’ve created PLN Highlights–... You can add PLN Highlights to your aggregator–or, if you’re not a big aggregator person and blog reader, you can sign up to get posts via email.

Read Walt's original post for more information or just poke around at the wiki.

 

LISjobs.com Launches Online Community

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
For further information, contact Rachel Singer Gordon, [email protected]
January 2, 2008

LISjobs.com Launches Online Community

New discussion forums now open

LISjobs.com, the largest free library career portal on the Internet, is pleased to announce the launch of its new online community for librarians. Devoted entirely to career development and job hunting, these forums provide a space for librarians, LIS students, library workers, and information professionals to discuss professional development issues: http://lisjobs.com/forum/.

“I’m excited to be able to offer this space for collaboration and discussion,” says Rachel Singer Gordon, webmaster, LISjobs.com. “As librarians, we know that we work and learn best in community -- I look forward to watching the forums grow.” Current forum moderators include:

• Michael Stephens, LIS schools
• Jess Bruckner, Jumpstart your career
• Meredith Farkas, Professional development and participation
• Susanne Markgren, Talking tenure
• Kim Dority, Professional writing
• Sophie Brookover, Work/life balance

In recent related developments, Info Career Trends, LISjobs.com’s professional development newsletter, has moved to the Wordpress platform to better serve its subscribers. Its long-time career Q&A columnists, Tiffany Allen and Susanne Markgren, have moved to their own blog, and author/entrepreneur Kim Dority joins in with her new monthly column on “Rethinking Information Careers.”

Info Career Trends continues to fill an underserved niche, devoted entirely to career and professional development issues for librarians and information professionals. The newsletter and column content are accessible at: http://www.lisjobs.com/career_trends/. Rachel Singer Gordon shares: “I’m so pleased to bring Kim on board, and to watch the Library Career People column evolve in its new blog format. I look forward to hearing others’ opinions across the LISjobs.com online community.”

LISjobs.com, launched in 1996, provides free library-related job listings to both employers and job seekers, as well as related services from resume postings to career development blogs.

###

LISjobs.com: http://www.lisjobs.com
Online community: http://www.lisjobs.com/forum
Info Career Trends newsletter: http://www.lisjobs.com/career_trends/
Contact: Rachel Singer Gordon, [email protected]

Stephen Abram on change

Stephen wrote a long article recently on change, which struck both positive and negative chords with its readers.  You may not agree with all that he says, but there likely there is something in the article for you to ponder.  Here is what stood out to me:

I believe that we can’t control change on a personal level. I can, however, control my own emotional reaction to it. On the other hand, I do agree with those who say that the best way to predict the future is to invent it. We, libraries, have the ability and the intelligence to create a future that is compelling, desirable, and independent of the visions that are driven by advertisers. In fact, I believe that we have a duty to invent this future.

What Helps You Manage Change

In my inaugural post here at the SLA-IT Blog I'd like to ask you what helps you (personally) handle change?  The fact of the matter is that we all have trouble with change, some of us are just better at hiding it than others :)

For me, it's a song.  Pretty simple right?  Well, maybe not, it's a song that I have been listening to for years, but have just come to appreciate even more.  The song is titled "The Wood Song" and it's by the Indigo Girls.  You can find the complete lyrics on their site.  I'd also like to share some of them here with you.

The song starts out by saying "the thin horizon of a plan is almost clear my friends and I have had a hard time bruising our brains hard up against change" - how many times have you felt that way? The fact of the matter is, no matter how much we fight it - and we all do at times - change is going to happen.  The song ends with:

sometimes i ask to sneak a closer look skip to the final chapter of the book and maybe steer us clear from some of the pain that it took to get us where we are this far but the question drowns in its futility and even i have got to laugh at me cause no one gets to miss the storm of what will be just holding on for the ride the wood is tired the wood is old and we’ll make it fine if the weather holds but if the weather holds then we’ll have missed the point

I just love this song!  It's one of those bits of my younger days that has stuck with me and grown with me over the years.  I highly recommend that you find a copy (maybe a friend has a CD you can listen to) or buy a copy on your favorite MP3 site, it's well worth a listen and well worth sharing with those colleagues who are having trouble adapting to the high rate of change we're all going through right now.