Yearly Archives: 2011

251 posts

Update: Results of Survey on Digital Preservation Training

Barrett Jones at the LOC writes: Hi Michael- Thank you so much for posting the announcement for our survey back in October. Thanks to you and other dedicated librarians who spread the word, we received over 800 responses to our survey. I wanted to share some highlights from the results: Findings from a Library of Congress Survey on Digital Preservation Training What do U.S. organizations see as their needs with respect to digital preservation training?  How do they handle digital preservation functions now?  A new Library of Congress survey provides some answers to these questions. The survey was conducted in summer […]

Exploring Transliteracy: A TTW Guest Post by Jessica Thomson

Transliteracy: 21st century literacy It is clear that technology is creating a large change in the ways we communicate and get information within our culture.  This great change affects not only individuals, but also the institutions that make information available, such as libraries and universities.  For a very long time, the essential modes of human communication remained unchanged. Having the ability to read, write, and speak more or less ensured that one possessed the necessary tools to communicate effectively within our culture.  With the explosion of new technologies that affect the way in which we accomplish so many of our […]

Thoughts on Learning Communities & Support

David Wedaman at Brandeis has a couple of thoughtful posts up at his blog Theatrical Smoke. I’m very happy to be working with him and Gail Matthews-DeNatale on a poster presentation at next month’s EDUCAUSE Learning Initiatives conference. Take a look at his posts: http://wedaman.wordpress.com/2011/01/20/whither-academic-support/ Your community will learn its way forward. It’s people stuff, it’s faith, it’s risk, it’s scary, it’s trust, it’s vulnerability, it’s Negative Capability, it’s relationship-building, it’s engagement on an ideas plane, it’s meaningful personal and community development. It’s perhaps the opposite of everything we’ve ever done. It’s perhaps everything we’ve consciously and subconsciously veered away […]

Using Foursquare to Reach New Audiences

Jasper Visser writes at Museum of the Future: Our new website, and especially its integration of Google Maps, made it easy to add stories from our website to relevant places in Foursquare. About a month ago I’ve added 15 stories as tips to Foursquare. And it seems to work! Some of the tips have been done relatively often and between 0.05 and 0.1 % of our website traffic (wow!) now comes from Foursquare. Here’s what I did (and/or should have done, looking back): I looked for things on our website (stories, etc.) directly related to a location. Then I looked […]

Message from CILIP – Save Our Libraries

A friend from the UK asked me to share this with TTW readers – Mark Taylor from CILIP writes: Here at the UK’s Chartered Institute of Library & Information Professionals we’re looking for help from across the globe with a day of action in support of UK public library services. www.cilip.org.uk/savelibraries The day is called Save Our Libraries and it takes place on the 5th Feb. Internationally we are hoping for a global day of tweeting using the hashtag #savelibraries in support of UK public library services. Can you please encourage your community to tweet using #savelibraries about why public libraries are […]

Teens Through Time Movie Series

As much of a fan of putting together elaborate and  unique programs at my library, at the same time I feel it’s good to balance things out with some laid back stuff as well.  This lead to my desire to seek out a movie license so that we could show some films.  It was a program that could easily happen and at the same time give our teen patrons something to do. I tried a Random Movie Night program at first.  It was probably the least amount of work I put into a program and I had hoped for high […]

No Balloons: “Serious Rule At The Yonkers Public Library”

balloons, originally uploaded by nycscout. Via AL Direct: http://www.scoutingny.com/?p=3399 I’m amazed that this is such a problem as to necessitate a laminated sign. I mean, I wasn’t planning on bringing any balloons inside…But it’s sort of a downer to know I couldn’t if I suddenly got the urge. -SCOUT Read the comments as well: t’s probably kids from the middle & high schools who created the need for the sign. I grew up about 10 minutes away and there was a tradition in my town of people bringing mylar balloons for you on your birthday for you to tie to […]