When I first found out I would be doing a three hour presentation for the Small Public Library Management Institute (SPLMI) on technology in libraries with Richard Kong and Toby Greenwalt, I thought two things. One: this is going to be awesome. Great friends. Great topic. We are going to rock this. And two: THREE HOURS?! OMG THAT IS SO LONG! HOW AM I GOING TO TALK THAT LONG? And yes, I do think in all caps sometimes. Yet as we prepared and started building our presentation, which we now lovingly refer to as The Beast, we all realized that the topic is so vast and three hours is probably going to go by in the blink of an eye. This topic is no longer just a talk about website management. This encompasses soooooooo much more these days - from social networks and eBooks to digital media labs and makerspaces, we had a lot of ground to cover. So on Wednesday, our time went quickly and we decided to blog on the topics that we couldn't cover in the presentation. If you follow along with the slides, I will be writing about building a tech friendly organization, which begins on slide #158.
Experiential models, such as Learning 2.0, show that people learn best when given the opportunity to learn things on their own terms. Later this year, we will see a resurgence of this with Michael Stephens' MOOC project.
In a similar way, Northbrook Public Library implemented a Summer of Learning in 2012. Librarians and staff members who were passionate about certain types of technology taught classes on their favorite topics, such as Foursquare or Pinterest. By making it an event and finding people who are already truly excited about their topics, we were able to drive enthusiasm for learning about these technologies.
On slide #168, you can see Toby, Richard, and I collaborating on this presentation. As we continually failed to find a time when all three of our schedules would allow us to meet in person, we decided to meet online instead. Using Google Drive, we were able to meet remotely, often between the hours of 9pm and midnight - the only time all three of us were available - and worked collaboratively to build our presentation.
Thank you so much to everyone at SPLMI, the Illinois State Library, and of course, to the library directors in the audience. It was truly a pleasure.
Check out both Richard's and Toby's posts for more on this presentation.
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Today at the library, we sent four librarians, including myself, to the Metra station to set up a table, and let people know about our eBook collections. We have started to realize that we spend a lot of time, a lot of money, and a whole lot of grief building up these collections, but do people really know they exist? This is where outreach comes into play. I think you could probably argue that the majority of your community does NOT know that you have eBooks and yes, this includes the people that already have library cards. We helped over 57 people in just two hours. All of them had library cards already. Only 2 people knew that we had eBooks.
Never forget to get outside of the library. Just because you put up a sign, or add something to your newsletter, doesn't mean that you have done your job promoting. Here are the simple steps:
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