At the request of the students, our class embarked on a geography themed expedition this year to study the beauty and mystery of this huge country. All the students in our class are new to the US. After researching they have became experts on one of the US Census regions. In addition, they developed a practical understanding of how the world is categorized into the 5 themes of geography. –Catherine Paul I wanted to share this awesome project some of the teens who use my library just did at their school. They came into the library today and were really […]
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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 […]
The Portland Regional Chamber held its annual business expo on Wednesday, and booths included the usual: credit unions, hotels, sign shops, telecom companies, the Portland Public Library. Attendance was light in the early afternoon, but began to pick up as …. — “Wait!” I know you’re all saying, astonished: “The Portland Public Library???!!” Sonya Durney, who is the Business and Government Librarian at my library just recently did something super awesome. She took her show on the road the Portland Business Expo and talked to local small businesses about the benefits of using their local library. Durney explained: “If we can […]
What a great partnership. I’ve been playing Kid Icarus: Uprising on my 3DS for the past few weeks and have been enjoying the experience quite a bit. The 3DS is a neat little system and from what I see here in this video it makes the Louvre experience even cooler. -Post by Justin Hoenke,Tame the Web Contributor
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 […]
The Young Writers and Leaders film is part of a Telling Room program, Sonya Tomlinson, David Meiklejohn, and 15 Portland, Maine area teens (all of whom use my teen library everyday!). Simply stated, the film tells the stories of the teens and their involvement in the Telling Room program and their lives in Portland, ME. Their goal is to take their film and the fifteen teen participants on a trip to Boston and spend the day in the city visiting a sister writing center, pairing up with Boston-area young writers, and holding a screening of the film in a film house […]
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 […]
The backstory: I’ve been working with a fellow Portland Mainer named Kirsten Cappy who runs the book consulting company Curious City to come up with a program to promote the new book Reunited by Hilary Weisman Graham (out June 2012). We had the idea to send the book out on the road, much like the characters in the story. We asked “how can this work and how can we help out libraries?” My response was: “make it easy and simple for teen libraries and give them a summer reading program in a box”. Simple things for the library to host and give their community something neat […]
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 […]
Shirky, of course, advocates that we embrace “as much chaos as we can stand.” In this scenario, staff is encouraged to try out a new thing without regard to the way “it’s always been done.” This is messy, scary, and probably unwanted in most institutions. Ideas above are from: Cognitive Surplus by Clay Shirky Embracing Chaos by Michael Stephens It has been a little over a month since we began our grand experiment with lending devices to teens (for the first post on this, go here. for the second, go here) and I am here to check back in and […]