Monthly Archives: July 2008

Electing a US President in Plain English

July 30, 2008
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It’s no secret that I love the In Plain English videos, so I’m sharing the newest one, even though this is a bit off topic.  Rg] Bookmark on Delicious Digg this post Share on FriendFeed Buzz it up Share on netvibes share via Reddit Share with Stumblers Tumblr it Buzz it up Subscribe to the comments on this post Print for later Tell a friend

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What advice do you have for an aspiring librarian?

July 24, 2008
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Last week as I was writing for the Day in the Life Project I got an email from Shannon asking for professional advice, since I’m not a School Librarian, I feel ill equipped to give it.  Instead I suggested that I post the questions on my blog for other librarians to answer.  I know we’re a really great group people that love to give advice!  Shannon said she was up for it, so here is a modified version of her email. Hi my name is Shannon. I got your email from your blog that was listed on the Day in the life of a librarian wiki. I just wanted to know if you could give me some advice on switching careers to become a school librarian or a librarian who specializes in youth literature etc. I have a B.S. in Journalism and Mass Comm from North Carolina A&T State University and a MS in New Media from Syracuse University. I work as a online producer/video editor at a newspaper. My plan was to become a teacher (teaching English literature) work for a 2 or 3 years then get a Masters in Library Science with an endorsement in school media. This will take me

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Using a wiki for Reader’s Advisory

July 22, 2008
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Using a wiki for Reader’s Advisory

One of the first things we started when I came to MRRL was create online Reader’s Advisory lists for patrons.  We’ve used a couple of different services for this in the last 3 years, but they cost money and were controlled by outside vendors.  Earlier this year I was looking for funding to be able to add some new services and it occurred to me that the Library could save money by using a wiki to provide What to Read Next list.  I got the go ahead from the director, we installed Mediawiki and  I’ve been busy coding.  So I’m pleased to announce the new Reader’s Advisory wiki.  It is pretty “bare bones” looking, as wikis are hard to customize, but our logo is there and it has a nice clean look that matches our blog.  It includes links to lists created internally, pdfs, and lists other places on the web. I’m still working on it and in the spirit of 2.0 it will always be changing.     Remember wikis are the platform for the content your patrons are looking for. They don’t care how it gets delivered as long as they get it.  Using a wiki just make your life easier and seamless integration makes your patrons life easier. 

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Day in the life of a librarian – Summary

July 19, 2008
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As of writing this (10:30 am central time 7/19/08 ) there are over 30 people signed up on the wiki (thank you again Lori for having the smarts to make one!) I hope this can be an ongoing project with new people continuing to sign up and maybe people who participated now can do it again. I’ve read some really great posts and I’m not even though them all yet.  I do have to point out somone who took a different approach to the Project. One of the other Librarians at MPOW has agreed to do a series of guest posts about her week July 28th – August 1st.  She is our Collection Development Librarian, so you’ll be getting a completely different view of my work place. Some information that probably should have been included in my first post - My job title and what it means. I’m the Digital Services Librarian at the Missouri River Regional Library, a public library in the Midwest serving about 85,000 people.  So what does that mean?  You’ve seen from the posts what I do some days, here is a more official run down of my duties Identify, investigate, and use emerging technology to enable easy access to information Anticipate

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Friday & Saturday – days in the life of a librarian

July 18, 2008
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Friday Technically I’m off because I work this coming weekend.  I cleaned the apartment, cooked, went to the gym.  I also check  all email accounts and see a request from one of the other Librarians, she needs someone to cover the Reference Desk for her Monday, I was planning on taking Monday off, but I tell her if she can’t find anyone else I’ll do.  I end up doing it for her, which moves my day off to Friday Time to work on presentations!  I’m cohosting a 4 day workshop (pdf) coming up that is hosted by MOREnet & the Missouri State Library teaching Librarians about how they can use web 2.0 at their library.  We did a similar workshop in February and it was so popular that they asked us to come back and tripled our talk time.  I’ll be doing two presenations at our upcoming state library conference in October and even though it’s early I put some time into both of these.  I have three patron training classes left this year.  We’ve been doing series of classes including basic and advanced (I teach the advanced ones).  They have been really popular with the patrons.  I take a look at what

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photo by Beth Tribe

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