Blog Project: Week of May 31- June 5 2011

I have decided to go through my blogs on a week by week basis.  This will make it easier to summarize the issues and my thoughts.  I will refer to Annoyed Librarian as AL and Hey Jude as HJ, just to make things easier.

Annoyed Librarian  had two posts this week.
  In Provocative to Whom?, there is a discussion of the  "provocative statements"  released by the Taiga Forum, which describes itself as a "community of AULs, and ADs challenging the traditional boundaries in libraries."  (AULs are Assistant or Associate University Librarians and ADs are Associate Deans or Assistant Directors.)  These released statements are meant to start conversation and critical thinking about library issues, not necessarily predict the future.  AL points out that in the past, when the first "provocative statements" were released, they were neither very provocative because most were already happening.  The same goes for the new statements.
My thoughts:  I agree with AL in that the statements are not very predictive of the future, and any conversation provoked by them is already late.  Many of the statements are examples of things already happening, especially statement #2: radical cooperation, which states that withing five years, research libraries should reduce budget cuts by cooperating with other universities in jointly-owned collections, etc.   Well, I am pretty sure we do that or at least something similar, with our database and e-journals and any other online sources that we use.

In Teachers and Librarians in L.A., the NPR story L.A. School District Tells Librarians: You're Not Teachers Anymore.  Apparently, L.A. is trying to alleviate budget cuts by reclassifying the job titles of school librarians, from teacher librarians to just school librarian.  This will make it easier to cut these jobs, and approximately 85 librarian positions are being cut.  AL states that the school district is right.  They are librarians, not teachers.  However, that doesn't mean that they don't teach things.  But, according to the school district, teaching students how to use the library and promoting English and literacy does not count. They are even trying to decide if librarians with education degrees can be classroom teachers.  There is a similar mindset in academic libraries.  Many librarians have trouble referring to themselves as professors or even faculty, even when they teach a class!  For some reason, teaching a "real" subject in a semester long class is different than teaching a semester long class in information literacy, or any other class a librarian may need to teach. 
Librarians are considered to be the low end of the totem pole because people are uninformed of what they actually do.  It is the school librarians job to get out there and make a case to the public and the school boards.  They need to let everyone know exactly what it is that they do, and why it is important.  Unfortunately, they haven't done this very well in the past.
My thoughts:  I agree with a lot of things in this blog.  However, if the school librarians in California are required to get a teaching certificate, then, I believe, this classifies them as teachers.  Maybe the school district doesn't see them as relevant because their programs are behind and haven't gotten a chance to catch up with new technology.  This is very unfortunate for these schools and the students.  Twenty-five years later, I still remember going to my elementary school library and being so happy to search for and check out my books.  Then we would all sit around the table, while the librarian read to us.  It is a wonderful memory that many children will miss out on.

HeyJude  had several posts this week.  This blog is by a librarian in Australia, so many of her posts are going to be about things happening in the Australian library systems.  But, we are a global community, so it will apply here as well.

In Essential Tools: Using Easy Bib, there is a guest post by Stacy Taylor, Information Services Manager at Monte Sant' Angelo Mercy College, who uses Easy Bib in her International Baccalaureate secondary school for girls. Easy Bib is a free bibliography maker.  It helps with works cited and has formatting for APA, MLA and Chicago styles. Ms Taylor explains that the school used to use a Harvard referencing tool called citation, but had to switch to a different application for several reasons.   One was that their school became a Mac school and the previous referencing tool was incompatible.  Secondly,  a higher standard of reference was required for the essays and projects.  Also, many of the teachers hadn't done a bibliography since their college days, and were unfamiliar with the current styles. 
My thoughts: It is great to know that those programs are out there, to provide reference.  I wonder if the schools are actually teaching the students to make the bibliography on their own, or just allowing them to generate them through the program?

For Paint Your Own Horizons, the author shares some information on advocacy and promotion of your library.  In the Horizon Report 2011 K-12, school library professionals are told to keep technologies in the forefront of their thinking.  The National Australian Library Association put together a website to inform people about the role of the school library in their community.  It is called What a Difference a School Library Makes.
My thoughts: It is important for librarians and members of the community alike to be informed of what's going on in the academic/school library world.  Other libraries should think of ways to use technology, or Web 2.0 principles, to find opportunities for promotion of their services and programs.  This would help the public to perceive them in a different light.

Our Book Passion- in an ebook age describes the author's experience going to a Reading Matters conference hosted by the State Library of Victoria. This conference enabled librarians, teachers, and teacher librarians to mingle with authors and learn about the topics they write about.  It was an excellent opportunity to speak with your favorite author, and get a book signed.  The author later lamented the fact that now that she uses an e-reader, she no longer buys paper books, thus had nothing to get signed, which was a favorite thing to do.
This blog also mentions the website Inside a Dog, which is by the State Library of Victoria.  It is a place where students can post book reviews or participate in Book Clubs, no matter their location.
My thoughts:  This reading conference sounds like a lot of fun.  I can't believe the author passed up an opportunity to obtain signatures from authors just because she had an e-reader.  Yet another reason why I don't need/want one.  The website seems really interesting.  I wish they had something like that around when I was younger.  That would have been something I was all over.  But, unfortunately, there was no internet back then........

Librarian Blogs

A few weeks ago, I stated that I was going to follow two blogs of librarians and blog about them. They are Hey Jude and Academic Librarian.  Academic Librarian was a poor choice.  It looked like it was a fairly active blog, but has not turned out to be so.  I am changing my second blog to Annoyed Librarian. 

Fifth Item for 23 Things

The fifth and final item I am going to try for this activity is #10: Find and play around with an online image generator.  There are many online image generators and editors to choose from.  Some of them have pictures that allow you to place captions, or make signs, or even put your face on another body.  Other sites allow you to upload your picture and modify it in any way imaginable.  You can resize it, recolor it, give it a different border, frame it and many, many, many more.  Some sites that I found were Imagegenerator.org, Online Image Editor. and Pixlr.  These are all free sites and very easy to use.  I really liked the Pixlr site, because it allowed you to change the color and texture of your picture.  You could make it look really old, or have spots in it, or pretty much whatever effect.  It is a really fun site, and simple to use.

  Here is a pic of me and Kris Kristofferson at the Tampa Theatre last month.

I really like the way the picture looks old, and almost like light had leaked through and exposed the film.

I also used the Imagegenerator website for some fun with celebrities and made my own captions.

These image generators and photo editors can be very useful in the library.  Librarians can use pictures to generate their own captions for signs in the library.  They can use photo editors to manipulate photos of events and save them to a flickr account for the library.  These tools are very useful in many different ways in a library settings.  All you need is someone creative to figure out how to make them effective.

Fourth Challenge Item

The fourth item I tried was #20: Discover Youtube and a few other sites that allow users to upload and share videos.These sites allow people to watch videos and upload them to their various websites, blogs or Facebook.  Millions of people view these videos everyday.  It would be a great way for libraries to "advertise" their services in a fun and creative way.
  Usually, I utilize Youtube for purely entertainment purposes.  I don't really go to the site to search for videos, but watch the ones that my friends post or share with me.  Sometimes after watching a video, I might scroll through related videos that are posted nearby.  There are several other sites for sharing videos including Google Videos and Yahoo Video.
  There are many videos that would be useful to librarians. A lot of the videos are instructional. The Library of Congress has their own Youtube channel to which one can subscribe.
  


There are also videos about the proper way to conduct a reference interview





and how not to conduct a reference interview.






There are many, many more videos about libraries and quite a lot of really funny ones, too, including, but certainly not limited to, the following:

My Third Challenge Item

For my third 23 Things challenge activity, I chose #8:  Learn about RSS feeds and set up your own Bloglines account.  RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication.  An RSS reader allows users to get all the information for their favorite websites and blogs sent to one central site.  That way, they can see when new information comes up and don't have to check all their favorite sites individually.  It is a time saving mechanism.  Also, only the new posts or stories will post to the site, so there is not any advertising to wade through. The user subscribes to their favorite website by clicking on the RSS icon on the web page. 

I tried the Bloglines website, but didn't care for it.  I am completely clueless to RSS feeds and that sited did nothing to help or enlighten me in how I should start out.  I read another classmate's blog and they suggested Google Reader.  I went to their site and found it to be much more user friendly.  Since I already had a GMail account, it just took a few minutes to set up the reader and determine what sites I wanted to follow.  That was the hardest part.  I don't generally follow a lot of websites, so I don't know that this particular application would be so great for me, but I can see where it might be useful in a library setting.  There are websites with RSS feeds for book reviews like this one by the Reader's Club of the Charlotte Mecklenberg Library.  New book reviews are posted.  Libraries can use this information to determine what books to add to their collections.  Libraries might also be interested in some of the many library blogs out there, too.  RSS readers are very useful tools in the new 21st century library, but I don't know personally how long I will continue to use the feed I set up.  Maybe it will be a time saver.  As a side note, I did add the RSS option to my blog.

Second Challenge Item

The second thing I chose to do was: 11. Explore any site from the Web 2.0 awards list, play with it and write a blog post about your findings.  I actually use quite a few of these sites on a regular basis, like Youtube, Facebook, Monster, Careerbuilder and a few more.  A few days ago, while wandering around through the Hillsborough County Library website, I found Mango Languages.  This is a sight that everyone with a Hillsborough library account can access with their card.  They offer 48 languages with 14 ESL options.  I played around with French, which I have experience with, and German, no experience.  There are different chapters with different lessons in each chapter.  It starts you out easy, with simple salutation phrases.  The phrase is said aloud, which the user is then supposed to repeat.  More words are added, but their is constant repetition and you can always choose to hear how the phrase is supposed to be said.  This is definitely one of the coolest, FREE, things I have seen in awhile.  Who needs Rosetta Stone?  Mango Languages might be where it's at!

More on the 23 things

Okay, I decided to use the challenge that the San Jose State University and San Jose Public Library employees did.  It's pretty much the same as the Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenburg.  The website is here: SJPL 23 Things.   Since we only have to do five things (but can do more, I'm sure), I am going to skip around a bit. The first thing I chose to experiment with was #3: creation of a blog.  Turns out, it's not too difficult.  The hard part is finding things to write about.  Guess it's good that I have this assignment to write about.