A TTW Guest Post by Sarah Jo Zaharako My fifth grade library students just designed their dream libraries. Every Friday for a month, during library class, students collaborated to create slideshow presentations representing exactly what they wanted in a public library. Inspired by innovative library spaces, services, and programs worldwide, students considered possibilities that went far beyond their current perceptions of libraries. Brainstorming was outlandish, collaboration was messy, and students enthusiastically poured their hearts into this project. They found images online, built idea boards using Google docs, designed spaces on MineCraft, and created totally unique models and drawings. Students who […]
Categories Hyperlinked Library
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Glad to do a short session for the Sirsi Dynix Connections Summit today. Thanks to everyone who was watching – apologies for the slide issue! You can download the slides here. Useful Links: Selected Library Journal “Office Hours” columns cited: Adopt or Adapt Libraries in Balance Stephens, M. (2016). The Heart of Librarianship. Chicago: American Library Association Editions.
Dr. Mary Vasudeva wrote this post in response to readings in her MLIS course INFO 298 The Hyperlinked Library “Leave the library and go where the people are.” (Stephens, 2017, Built for people). I happened to be in a situation where I couldn’t listen to the lecture for this course module (on an airplane), so I was going through the slide show. . . which made me think about learning modes in general. And then, I got to slide 5, which states “The heart of libraries is learning and supporting our users’ curiosity through every means possible” (Stephens, 2017, Library […]
As a student in Dr. Michael Stephen’s Hyperlinked Libraries course at San Jose State University, Beth Harper wrote six reflection blog assignment posts over the course of the semester. Each of those posts has been published on Tame the Web and can each be read here: Where we live – Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 * * * * * Beth Harper is a public services paralibrarian living in historic central Denver and working in the western foothills under the shadow of the Front Range, and an MLIS student at San Jose […]
Practice Toodling around in the Denver Art Museum between lunch and work yesterday (I work 4-8pm on Thursdays) I realized – right now, I have time. To slow down, to pay attention, to explore. I always feel under such tremendous pressure to use my time well, and right now, this is using my time well – getting to know my new city, getting rested, spending my time on the bus and train getting caught up on all the reading I haven’t done in the last few years. Thinking and processing. Refilling the well. This is important. I’ll cycle back around to the part […]
The pulse and the flow So what do people want from us? They want help doing things, rather than finding things. – Brian Kenney, “Where Reference Fits in the Modern Library” Infinite learning. Infinite learning. This is actually a really hard topic for me to write about, because it’s so personal, so close to my heart. I don’t know where to start. It’s like talking about breathing. Infinite learning is more than lifelong learning. Lifelong learning is where the mainstream core of the profession is now: “….All purposeful learning activity, whether formal or informal, undertaken on an ongoing basis with the […]
Grounded, but with one eye on the horizon “When you press the pause button on a machine, it stops. But when you press the pause button on human beings they start… You start to reflect, you start to rethink your assumptions, you start to reimagine what is possible…” And it is not just knowledge that is improved by pausing. So too, is the ability to build trust, “to form deeper and better connections, not just fast ones, with other human beings.” – Thomas Friedman (2017, pp 3-4), quoting Dov Seidman I just finished reading two thought-provoking books, made all […]
Boundaries, Connections, and Transformation [B]oth ends act as anchors and as targets… – from the Wikipedia definition for hyperlink I didn’t set out in this class to keep coming back to a single a cohesive and overarching metaphor in my reflection posts about the deeply personal emotional experience of librarianship within the communities we traverse and occupy; but, always, the themes emerge in the course of the writing. I’m thinking this week about hyperlinked environments, and hyperlinks and environments and where those two concepts intersect and inform each other, which leads to information ecology, which leads to social geography, to GIS and big data in community advocacy, to the […]
Love makes a community When I lived in Seattle right after library school I was an AmeriCorps volunteer at Seattle Public Library and helped start the Wired for Learning program which taught tech skills to folks who needed them. In Seattle that was mostly low income folks, new immigrants and people with cognitive or physical disabilities. My feeling was that I’d do that for a few years, then everyone would have learned the stuff and then we could move on to more sophisticated topics […] Then I moved to the east coast which was a bit behind the west coast and […]
About a week after I got the offer for my current job, and ten days or so before I started, I went to my future workplace and walked in the front door. I did not tell anyone who I was or why I was there. I just puttered around, getting a sense of the place and how it felt to be a patron there, how intuitive it was, how welcoming. Where people clustered, and for what purposes. What self-services were available, and how navigational information was arranged, and how readily staff made themselves visible and available to help. What I saw […]