Yearly Archives: 2010

237 posts

Thanks MAME 2010

Thanks to everyone who attended the Michigan Association of Media in Education Conference this week in Dearborn, Michigan. This was my first in-person talk since my canine accident. Everyone was so helpful and accommodating! I enjoyed talking with the school librarians from all over the state. The slides are here: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/239835/HyperlinkedSchoolLibraryMAME10.pdf The article based on this presentation is here: https://tametheweb.com/2010/03/02/the-hyperlinked-school-library-engage-explore-celebrate/

Chicago PL Ponders Red Box Like Service

http://www.suntimes.com/news/cityhall/2835576,CST-NWS-redbox26.article ”It would be bestsellers, DVDs and popular items, just like our popular library. You’d put your library card in, select an item, it comes out and you’d return it back to the same place or to any one of our libraries,” Dempsey said. ”Some of these vending machines store up to a hundred items. Some of them store more than that. . . . This is just another way to get materials into the hands of the public. It’s a new product, and we’re talking with our colleagues in other cities to see how it’s working for them. We’re […]

Just in Time for Halloween! Zombies in the Library

Via Benjamin Wheal comes this spooky idea you could adopt for your library or library group. This year the South Australian Library & Information Network (SALIN) Committee has chosen to celebrate our diverse and changing profession through production of the 2011 calendar “Zombies in the Library”. In 12 beautifully rendered scenes the calendar covers such topics as the role of the Zombie in reference, the frustrations faced when the Undead hog the photocopier, and for cataloguers, poses the eternal question: 299.675 or 398.21?  All calendars come in A3 size, are professionally bound and beautifully printed (and you can even choose your starting […]

Illinois Libraries Go Green

Don’t miss: http://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/news/10252010/illinois-libraries-talk-sustainability Sixty librarians from around Illinois met at Chicago’s Field Museum October 22 to discuss how they could better help their communities go green. The workshop kicked off the Illinois Library Association’s year-long Go Green @ your Illinois Library program, which aims to develop a group of librarians committed to environmental awareness. “It’s about libraries holding the conversation in their communities about sustainability,” said Denise Raleigh, director of marketing, development, and communications at Gail Borden Public Library in Elgin. “Libraries already connect people to resources; this is about connecting people to each other.” Find out more here: http://gogreenila.info/

The Transparent Library Director

I’m not a library director.  Heck, who knows if I’ll ever be a library director.  But spend some time working in a public library and you’ll see a common theme: most employees and the public have no clue what a library director does.  There’s this belief that the library director is some person way high up in the sky making all these decisions and pulling all these strings to make the library work. With such little information known about the day to day happenings of a library director, employees and patrons end up getting confused about the direction of the […]

Don’t Miss “Three Punk Rock Lessons for Surviving 21st Century Library Hell”

TTW Contributor Justin Hoenke serves up a mighty fine guest post at Heather McCormack’s blog: http://heathermccormack.wordpress.com/2010/10/25/guest-post-three-punk-rock-lessons-for-surviving-21st-century-library-hell/ For an example, I’m going to turn to Twitter. Just two years ago, I was a librarian in South Jersey tinkering with tweets, not knowing at all what I was doing. I took it upon myself to understand the strange little-big world of hyperlinks and handles. There were days when I didn’t get it and tweeted too much or avoided it out of a lack of confidence. But I kept pushing and experimenting. What finally happened reveals the true beauty of the DIY concept: […]

The Conduit Metaphor – A TTW Guest Post by David Wedaman

Kurt Fischer noted (in passing, at a Mind, Brain, Education Institute) that the Conduit Metaphor of Learning is defunct. This is the idea that education is essentially a kind of pipe whereby knowledge travels from the mouth or mind of a more- to a less-learned person. That the learner is a receptacle to be filled with knowledge. Learning, it ends up, is actually much more complex. And knowledge is apparently not a paper package of data tied with string moving across the meat counter. Which is just as well, because the Conduit Metaphor taken to the extreme leads to students thinking […]

The Hyperlinked Library – Updated Fall 2010

Preparing for class lecture in LIS768 Participatory Service & Emerging Technologies as well as the workshop at Internet Librarian International, I overhauled and updated most of my GIANT presentation centered around my model of “The Hyperlinked Library.” As usual, the slides contain citations, Flickr links and is full CC licensed. I already have updates and changes but I thought I would release this version. The original was first presented in Australia in 2008. Download the 303MB file here: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/239835/HyperlinkedLibFall2010Update.pdf The Hyperlinked Library by Michael Stephens is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at […]

Welcome to Office Hours – My New Column in Library Journal

I am very happy to announce I’m writing for LJ again! I thoroughly enjoyed writing The Transparent Library with Michael Casey for over two years – hopefully Michael and I can continue writing again soon! Those columns are some of my favorites. Now, I’m happy to be exploring avenues related to educating future librarians. http://bit.ly/coCkbX WELCOME TO “OFFICE HOURS,” a new space in Library Journal where we’ll explore what’s happening in library and information science education. In the coming months we’ll talk about the ongoing discourse about LIS schools; research that informs us, our users, and our facilities; and stories from the trenches on […]