I’ve been working in public libraries for five years now and recently decided to go back and look at the things I’ve done. Part of it was curiosity and the other part was to make sure that I’ve been doing my job and making interesting things happen for my community. Also, sometimes there’s a program or idea that you’ve had in the past that you’ve totally forgot about. Going back through my personal archives has helped me rediscover some ideas that I can now see through to completion. The Library Idea Share is my attempt to get these ideas and tools […]
Tags Justin Hoenke
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Note from Michael – I’m deep in two projects today and tomorrow and haven’t had much time to catch up on the hubub with Harper Collins and ebooks. I can say that I agree with Justin’s take on the potential and promise of promoting content creation, access to technology and building the community memory (whatever community it might be – civic, academic, education) as a big part of our future in libraries. I appreciate Justin’s hard work and insights. The news about HarperCollins placing loaning caps on ebooks in the Overdrive catalog—known as #hcod on Twitter—gobbled up my Twitter […]
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 […]
A Nintendo DS game for my wife Haley, some Captain Beefheart for our Saturday family night music, and a book about firemen to read to my son Finn before we go to bed tonight. I can’t think of a better way to spend our weekend. -Post by Justin Hoenke, Tame the Web Contributor
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 […]
First up, the Buy India a Library team wishes to thank everyone that has donated to the project. Right now, our total amount raised stands at £665, which is more than half of what we need to accomplish our goal of purchasing a village library! Awesome! If you have any questions about how the money we raise is being spent, please read our post here: Who spends the money we’re raising, and how? And finally, Andromeda did this really great interview at ALA Midwinter that explains the project and how it came to be. Thanks for everything, and if you […]
From the minds of Jan Holmquist (representing Denmark), Andromeda Yelton (representing the USA), and Ned Potter (representing the UK)… …comes Buy India a Library, a project started by librarians to fund a library in India via Twitter. Head on over to their blog for more information on the project and learn about how you can help them accomplish their awesome goal! What an awesome project and a wonderful team. I’ve been lucky to meet in person with Andromeda a few times and have many great discussions with Jan and Ned online. Kudos to them for making it happen! -Post by […]
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’m not a library director. Heck, who knows if I’ll ever be a library director. But spend some time working in a public library and you’ll see a common theme: most employees and the public have no clue what a library director does. There’s this belief that the library director is some person way high up in the sky making all these decisions and pulling all these strings to make the library work. With such little information known about the day to day happenings of a library director, employees and patrons end up getting confused about the direction of the […]
TTW Contributor Justin Hoenke serves up a mighty fine guest post at Heather McCormack’s blog: http://heathermccormack.wordpress.com/2010/10/25/guest-post-three-punk-rock-lessons-for-surviving-21st-century-library-hell/ For an example, I’m going to turn to Twitter. Just two years ago, I was a librarian in South Jersey tinkering with tweets, not knowing at all what I was doing. I took it upon myself to understand the strange little-big world of hyperlinks and handles. There were days when I didn’t get it and tweeted too much or avoided it out of a lack of confidence. But I kept pushing and experimenting. What finally happened reveals the true beauty of the DIY concept: […]