Rachel started with a good list and people added more in the comments. Are you planning a conference, workshop or program? Here are some tips to help you with the difficult job of speaker-wrangling. Has anyone made a list of tips for speakers yet? I’m on my way to North Dakota today to give a few talks at the North Dakota Library Association annual conference in Fargo. Please stop me and say hello if you see me.
my VR experience, follow-up
Two things to post in the aftermath of my virtual reference experience with Boston Public Library. First, Luke the Librarian, who does a lot of VR himself has written a long thoughtful post on what people should know about virtual reference, and what VR practitioners can still learn. Second, I got this follow-up email from the Social Sciences librarian at BPL with some more information both about the resources that were suggested to me as well as some information about the author of a book that was recommended, I guess he’s going to be in the area soon. Very cool, don’t you think? Marta Pardee-King is a class act. Note at the end of the transcript, someone there reads my blog too.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but this sort of ongoing patron-relationship model is one of the things that the flesh-and-blood librarian model has over the VR model. I had a fine interaction with the woman I worked with, but she’s paid to interact with me, and many other patrons, on a case by case basis ONLY. There is no possibility of having a longer-term patron/librarian relationship and every VR situation is a new case. The VR librarian never gets to know you, never learns your habits, doesn’t have an investment in your continued patronage and in fact wouldn’t have a way to continue a librarian relationship with you if they wanted to. This is a shame. Having an option for 24/7 readyref types of interactions is definitely a way of increasing the library’s presence. Making sure that answering reference questions doesn’t become simply a matter of expedience and profit-motive is equally important. Thanks again to BPL and the woman who tried to help me with my harder-than-I-thought-it-was question. I had not intended to turn this into an object lesson, I was just trying to help my friend impress his mother-in-law.
Simmons Skillshare report – nice work team!
Yesterday I went to the Simmons College GSLIS Skillshare. I was down in Boston anyhow, so scooting to this event was not difficult and was a lot of fun. Here is the wiki they did for the event. I can show you the two skillshares I went to — with my friend Jessica The Cool Librarian — Literacy and Services to Underserved Populations (reading list, syllabus and links list online), and Digital Information Services and Providers. Both presentations were done by students who really knew what they were talking about, and were interesting and well-received. I think Jessica and I were the only non-students at the skillshares. The keynote was a joint talk by Jenna Freedman and Eric Goldhagen. Jenna talked about the Radical Reference project (ppt) and Eric gave a talk on Open Source software for librarians (ppt). Then there was a nice vegan lunch by the folks at Veggie Planet.
This sort of event is a great way to get students some presentation experience before they have to sink or swim in front of a room of people at a conference or students in a classroom. The fact that everyone was in a classroom setting with (mostly) their peers made it more of a teaching situation and less of a presenting-type deal. I was particularly happy to learn that people in library school are still giving their attention to underserved populations as well as they were, and Jessica and I had some real-world examples that seemed like good complements to the outlines the presenters were giving. For a first event, this skillshare seemed wildly successful and my only personal regret — besides the lack of free ambient wifi — was that more librarians from the area didn’t attend; it was a really good time. Congrats to ASIS&T and PLG for a well-orchestrated event.
how it should work: book donations @ your library
From Daniel Cornwall, via LISNews comes a good example of how a public library can be friendly and firm about accepting book donations. Here’s the example from the blog of the Seldovia Public Library.
Recently, a very large donation was left outside the library, without notice, for days in boxes too large for our volunteers to lift once they did discover them. In that time, the books became weather-damaged as well as suffering from the territorial marking practices of local dogs. Would you want to read these books or have your children read them? What a sad waste, and one that could have been prevented with a phone call.
how it should work: Burger guest blogs on Google Blog
This seems like a nice way for librarians and Google to work together. Leslie Burger, ALA President, blogs on the Google blog about Banned Books Week.
Now blah blah blah whatever about Banned Books Week. I’ve made my opinion clear on this topic before. I think it should be called Buy Banned Books Week like any good shopping holiday, and there should be another whole week to talk about the nefarious spate of book challenges and what the real problems are that are causing this sort of thing in our public libraries and schools. Just because the books aren’t banned doesn’t mean there’s not a problem. On the other hand, having Google have a special Banned Books portal to highlight banned or challenged books through the ages is sort of cool and a nice ALA/Google partnership.
Of course searching for some of the books does a “library catalog search” which uses the terribly-imperfect still-beta Worldcatlibraries search which still shows me a “ready to buy?” link to Amazon.com before showing me if the book is in a library near me. Looks like there is a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird at Dartmouth… in the next state… where I don’t have a card. Remember folks, there are all sorts of ways to inhibit access to materials. Challenging and banning is one of them. Complicated and confusing software is another.