Via the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette… Gov. Tom Corbett’s no-new-tax pledge means he has to figure a way to slash billions of dollars across the board from Pennsylvania’s budget, and it’s unlikely libraries will emerge unscathed. Into this breach steps janet jai of Highland Park. (She had her name legally changed to lower-case letters a long time ago, but that’s another story.) Ms. jai (pronounced like the letter J), 65, has rushed out 500 copies of a self-published, 165-page paperback book, “Saving Our Public Libraries: Why We Should. How We Can.” We met Monday to discuss her fundraising suggestions. I had coffee […]
Categories Engaging Library Users
183 posts
DOK, the Library Concept Center in the Netherlands and home of the Shanachies has been working on digital storytelling tools for libraries and museums for a number of years now and have come up with new applications for Multi Touch that allow the users to bring their own content to the library. There have been a number of articles on the earlier apps DOK has developed such as the Heritage Browser. The Heritage Browser displays archival material from the City Archive in the library’s public space via a Microsoft Surface table. DOK has linked the material of the City Archive […]
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 […]
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 […]
I’m enjoying these new notebooks from Aaron Schmidt – the designs are fresh and the sentiment rings true. Take a look at http://www.walkingpaper.org/shop
Portland Public Teen Library: 2010 Year In Review on Prezi I’ve been thinking a lot about transparency this year. It might have to do with the term becoming a buzz word of some sorts, or maybe because the ongoing discussion concerning Wikileaks in news media. A huge part of me, however, thinks that I came to the conclusion that as a public employee I have an obligation to inform my community about what I’m doing. Nonetheless, I approached creating a 2010 year in review for the Portland Public Teen Library with this idea in mind. Here’s the full annual report […]
I’ve had the pleasure to sit and chat with Peter Bromberg on two occasions. Long, rambling chats about the profession, this online world we find ourselves inhabiting part of the time, and kindness. Into my aggregator comes this sweet little post that so succinctly sums up what I believe is our number one goal: So I went on to explain in less freaky terms that what I enjoyed about providing customer service was the opportunity to connect with other people, if only briefly, and possibly make their day just a little brighter. Regardless of the specific transaction (reference, pizza, dress […]
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 […]
(Higher quality) Use Libraries and Learn Stuff, originally uploaded by GeoShore. For more please see : http://use-libraries-and-learn-stuff.blogspot.com/2010/10/use-libraries-and-learn-stuff.html
At my library, we recently started up a circulating video game collection. Since we didn’t have a huge budget and we knew the collection was going to be rather small, we opted to go stark naked with security. There’s also an amazing vibe here in Portland, Maine. People really have a lot of trust in each other and everyone has a lot of faith in each other. We put the games out on the shelf in the cases, did our best to monitor things, and went about our business at the library. Recently, we’ve had some stuff stolen. Instead of […]