Categories TTW Ephemera

Washington, DC—First Lady Laura Bush will award five museums and five libraries the 2008 National Medal for Museum and Library Service, the nation’s highest honor, at a White House ceremony on October 7. Each year, the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), in coordination with the White House, presents the National Medal to 10 museums and libraries in recognition of their extraordinary civic, educational, economic, environmental, and social contributions. http://www.imls.gov/news/2008/092908.shtm “These 10 museums and libraries have gone above and beyond the call of duty to make a real difference in their communities. They reach out to people of […]

Skype Stations at Simmons GSLIS, originally uploaded by mstephens7. Are other school offering Skype Stations? This is ingenious!

http://thefischbowl.blogspot.com/2008/09/please-help-abby-with-her-homework.html Karl Fisch, whose blog I really enjoy, posts about an assignment his daughter has: to create a travel journal and write to friends to ask for postcards. Karl thinks like I do. What about the online component? I think this assignment is fine as far as it goes, and we mailed it off to a friend in Kentucky on Friday. But, and you’ve got to know what’s coming, I thought this assignment was ripe to have a “virtual companion” to it. So, I haven’t asked for much on this blog (well, other than changing the world), but I’d like […]

   Timber Wolf, originally uploaded by digitalART2. “Picturing the Wolf: The Art, Artifice, and Science of Being a Wolf in Children’s Books”   Saturday, September 27, 10:30 am Newberry Library Speaker: Debra Mitts-Smith, Dominican University, with comments and discussion by Roberta Seelinger Trites, Illinois State University Chicago Public Radio will be broadcasting the talk: http://www.chicagopublicradio.org/Event_Detail.aspx?eventID=964 Join Debra Mitts-Smith of Dominican University as she examines visual, textual, and folkloric sources to understand the wolf as an icon of widely varied meaning and nearly universal significance. She traces the image over time in children’s books from the “Big Bad Wolf” of fairy tales to […]

  Library quote, originally uploaded by alexandrayarrow.  

I haven’t got to mention that I’ll be chairing the ALA Web Advisory Committee for this coming year. I thank our president Jim Rettig for the appointment. I just sent this message to the group and wanted to share it here as well: Greetings Web Advisory Committee! I am very happy to serve as chair for this coming year. I’m even more excited about the launch of the new ALA website, which will be on September 22nd. The preview is available here: http://staging.ala.org/home.cfm Here’s some of what’s ahead: For the first two weeks, we’ll be asking the members of WAC to proactively spend […]

  Inside by the Fire courtesy of Lester Public Library That’s Gil. He’s enjoying the newspaper and the fire at Lester Public Library. The cliché says a picture is worth a thousand words but I must agree that the story this picture tells about what patrons will find at LPL is pretty darn priceless. With this in mind, have you seen “Laws for Using Photos You Take at Your Library” by Bryan Carson? http://www.infotoday.com/mls/sep08/Carson.shtml Carson covers the best ways to use photographs taken at library events and in the library for promotion: It is clearly a violation of the right […]

A wonderful post by Eric Schnell caught my eye last week. http://ericschnell.blogspot.com/2008/09/library-innovation-requires.html His words are so well-chosen and ideas so spot on IMHO: To move towards a move innovative organization requires experimentation, trial and error, doing new things, and breaking rules.  Libraries looking to become more innovative are confronted with reality: it takes 100 crazy ideas to find 10 worth funding experimentally in order to identify 1 project worth pursuing. As it has been said, that it takes a lot of acorns to grow an oak tree. The challenge is that most library organizations are structured and managed to continue current […]

Michael and I have been pondering ways to get feedback and input for our column in LJ. Weeks ago, we made a Twitter account and a few people even found it and followed us. Now, we’d like to promote it just a bit. We’ll be looking for ideas, insights and whatever you’d like to share a few times a month. Thanks! http://twitter.com/TransparentLib

http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/article/CA6582321.html Evergreen began in a similar way. In 2004, when it was obvious their legacy ILS could no longer support the needs of their 270-plus library consortium, Georgia PINES, the resource-sharing network of Georgia Public Library Service, held focus groups in which librarians were told, “Pretend it’s magic, and describe what you’d like library software to do.” (Disclosure: I work for Equinox, the support and development company for Evergreen.) Librarians then helped custom design the product to do the things existing software had not done well, whether it was reindexing large amounts of data, presenting book jackets in search results, […]