Following the inspiration of TED (actually, copying TED), our library partnered with our campus’ Center for Teaching & Learning to create a special event that highlights our campus’ faculty and staff. This event which we affectionately called TLC: Teaching & Learning Community event, featured five faculty and staff members who gave mini-lectures on a range of topics. Our goal was to host a program in our library that produced web-ready content. We purposely limited each speaker to 15 minutes per presentation. Our Goals Find teachers, innovators and leaders who are able to inspire us with “ideas worth sharing.” Create a […]
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Each month, our college has a show on one of the local public access television station (PHTV 4 in Palos Heights, Illinois). I was invited to participate to discuss libraries and librarians as well as help spread the word about services we offer to our local community. I saw this as a chance to do some local library advocacy, so you can judge how well I pulled it off. This was definitely something new for me (my segment starts at minute 3:33). Meet with Moraine (June 2012)
Perhaps I have been living under a rock but I just stumbled across the Idea Box from Oak Park Public Library, IL. Very interesting. TTW Contributor: Mick Jacobsen
Last week, a poet was in my office. We had planned a poetry reading, but she was pitching me a new idea focusing on a book she was writing about her birth father. Before that, a geography faculty member was describing a lecture about how hedgehogs can be used to explain key concepts in geography. Before that, I was at our marketing department proofing publicity for our upcoming One Book series. Before that, I was in a meeting about training staff members to run our HD cameras. When I was in library school, no one told me that one of […]
The Pritzker Fellowship from Chicago Public Media is designed to cultivate a “new generation” of journalists. The fellows are nominated by community organizations, cannot have a degree in journalism, must not be in an academic program, and must be interested in community reporting. This would be perfect for a librarian. In fact, I wish that I could nominate a librarian for this! Do you know a librarian who might qualify? Check out the curriculum from their website: Program Curriculum Throughout the training period, the Pritzker Fellows will work on many projects and develop skills within their chosen arena. The training will be extremely targeted […]
I’ve been thinking a lot about public libraries/organizations and social media lately, especially on the differences between Twitter and Facebook. I wanted to jot down some notes about what I think works and what doesn’t, & figured I’d share them publicly so that folks can do anything from heartily disagreeing with them in the comments to potentially benefiting from them. I’ve had a personal Twitter account and followed libraries with it since fall of 2007, but have only recently started tweeting for a library system (about a month now). I still have a lot to learn, but I’ve also learned […]
For the past year, I have had a foggy notion for a new librarian position, but I can’t quite get my mind wrapped around it. So, I am turning to you, TTW community, to help. Today, I am once again skimming through R. David Lankes’ amazing book The Atlas of New Librarianship. I am looking over page 67 at the idea of librarians as “Publisher of Community.” This may be the closest definition to what I have in mind. Lankes writes, “I foresee the day in the near future when librarians spend the majority of their time working with community […]
Clive Thompson recently gave an excellent interview on the findings tumblr as part of their “How We Will Read” series. In the interview, Thompson discusses his ideas on eBooks, social reading and the future of print. But I think that his thoughts about print on demand books are the most interesting. What you see with print on demand in the last couple of years is that there’s been explosion in the number of things printed, but they’re printed in small quantities: three, four, five copies total. They tend to be things like very specialty books; weird memoirs only three or four people […]
This is a guest post I asked Lian, a volunteer in the Skokie Library Digital Media Lab, to write. What is life like for DML volunteers and workers is a common question from people interested in DMLs, I hope Lian’s post will help explain what her volunteering looks like. – Mick Jacobsen With four tricked out Macs, a chroma key green wall, Blue Yeti microphones, a drawing tablet, scanners, various electronic instruments and more, the Skokie Public Library Digital Media Lab is the place to be if you’re looking to create. Each of the four Macs at the DML is […]
I have read quite a bit lately about the concept of social curation and sites such as Pinterest, a “virtual pinboard” for organizing and sharing images. ”Curation” is very much the nom en vogue these days for a number of disparate activities, and I imagine many librarians roll their eyes when they see this term used to describe RSS news aggregators, search filters and even brand strategy. Nevertheless, the rise of Pinterest has been nothing short of meteoric, and even Syracuse University’s iSchool is getting into the act, so I decided to try out the site and see for myself just how “curative” it really is. The first […]