Yesterday I was reading Breaking Up With Libraries by Nina McHale. I had a few thoughts. First and foremost, I was bummed that our profession was losing such an amazing and talented person. Nina has done amazing work for libraries and she will be sorely missed in this field. Secondly, this one passage of Nina’s hit me really hard: Also in the mix is my general frustration with library technology. We pay BILLIONS to ILS and other vendors each year, and for what? Substandard products with interfaces that a mother would kick to the curb. We throw cash at databases […]
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Johnson County Library contracted the services of Mindmixer for their strategic plan in March of 2013 and by April 9, 2013; the www.jocolibraryconversation.com site was live and active with input from members of the community. The goal was to expand the number of Johnson County citizens the library would be able to engage with during the strategic planning process. By May 15, just a little over a month from the launch date, 1,213 people visited the library site and in addition to responding to the topic questions, they submitted 117 ideas for the library staff and the strategic planning committee […]
Instead of siphoning teens off into different rooms (and locking away noisy activities), the space is airy and completely open. The openness means, among other things, that it only takes one or two librarians to monitor the entire space. Rice says his team renovated the floor on the cheap, using paint and low-cost materials to fill the space. “Teens appreciate the rawness,” he says. “Rich materials might be a little bit of a turn-off.” The key, he says, is a space without much security, where kids feel free to just hang out. “It makes teens feel as if they have […]
When I was a teenager, I spent most if not all of my time in video game arcades in shopping malls. It was the time of fighting games…Street Fighter II, Mortal Kombat, World Heroes, Primal Rage, and many, many more. Who knows how much money I spent playing those games and more importantly, who cares. What mattered most (and what sticks with me to this day) was being in the same room with people my age who enjoyed the same things as me. It was exciting. It was fun. It created friendships and community. Video gaming in libraries isn’t a new thing. […]
Note from Michael: Elaine takes us through her work on the #transtech group project for Huntington Beach Public Library and connects to our course texts. i am happy to share this insightful reflection! This report outlines the unique experiences, challenges, and opportunities in developing a Learning 2.0 program for the diverse community served by the Huntington Beach Public Library. This project – called Links to Literacy – was accomplished virtually as a group assignment in Dr. Michael Stephens’s Transformative Learning and Technology Literacies course in Spring 2013. It involved seven learning technology modules aimed to introduce communication, job searching, […]
I am honored to guest write at Tame The Web – a lighthouse for positive librarianship – with Michael’s philosophy of encouraging the heart. We all have different things that encourage our hearts and give us inspiration to do what we do – and make the world better. For me music is a big inspiration, a shelter and a motivator. Being a library person deep down in my heart, I have a theory that a lot of artists have positive experiences with libraries from their lives and that they have been inspired by libraries in some way when they were […]
The White Plains Public Library is doing some amazing things with their teens (claymation, LEGO catapults, and more) with Teen Librarian Erik Carlson at the helm. Recently, they finished up a minute long PSA about distracted driving. I’ll turn it over to Erik for more: This idea came from a film maker last year. He wanted to work with the library & the only money we had was from a grant from the Allstate Foundation. It was a large project where over a dozen teens worked on a PSA that lasted 5 minutes. We took that as a learning experience. […]
Malcolm Gladwell famously defined the “tipping point” as that magic moment when an idea or practice crosses some invisible threshold, tips, and spreads widely throughout a culture or society. Lately I’ve been wondering if the practice and benefits of mindfulness meditation are hitting that tipping point. The many benefits of mindfulness meditation have been known to Buddhist monks and western scientists alike for many years. But it is only recently that mindfulness seems to be recognized in the workplace as a valuable practice worth promoting and fostering among employees. In the past few months there have been a flurry of […]
Note from Michael: I am thrilled to have Leah writing here for TTW. Way back in 2006 when I started at Dom, I taught my very first LIS701 class. There was Leah, smiling on the front row every Monday evening. Watching her study, graduate and do incredible work has been incredibly rewarding to me as an LIS educator. Thanks, Leah! What do you think of when you hear the word extrovert? Loud, chatty, pushy? Yeah. Me too. It’s funny – the first time I ever took the Myers Briggs was in grad school. I remember my professor asking if anyone […]
When, in the early 2000s, you were passionate about your work in libraries, full of ideas and eager to hear others’ ideas about how libraries can best serve their communities, excited about what the future holds for libraries, hungry to discuss this stuff with people who shared these interests, and NOT a librarian or enrolled in library school or headed there, there were two great free channels where you could jump into the fray and educate yourself: listservs and blogs. These tools not only flattened geographies–so librarians from far-flung areas could ideashare– they flattened hierarchies: library paraprofessionals who might never […]