What Do You Geek?

From Geek the Library:

"Geek the Library is a community-based public awareness campaign designed to highlight the vital role of public libraries for individuals and communities, and raise awareness about the critical funding issues they face.

Whatever you GEEK, the Public Library supports it all. Public libraries inspire and empower. Everyone is welcome. Almost anything can be explored. And they play an important role for individuals and for communities."

Get your geek on here. Share your own story. Here's an example:



Note this campaign is sponsored by OCLC.

Back From Maternity Leave

Sorry for the long hiatus. I meant to post a message before leaving to deliver my second daughter, but that just didn't happen. Then, I tried to do so from home, but with a 2 year old and a newborn, well, that just didn't happen either. In fact, a lot doesn't happen anymore except total immersion in the lives of two wonderful girls and all the blessings that come with it. I will try to get back to regular blogging here as I can. In the meantime, here's a photo collage of where most of my energy goes these days :-)

Hysterical Satire on Twitter

For you twitter users (or those curious about it), here is a VERY entertaining video, the trouble with twitter:

Self Check Baby!

We are rolling out the self-check machines this week. The pilot study at Lancaster Public Library was a success. Wanted to share some photos of all of the hard work going on here at the System getting 14 stations set up - no easy task!! As you can see, John Ditmore is doing a lot of the work! Be sure to follow the project on LILLY (our intranet, requires login).

I'm a Shover & Maker!!

Check it out here. I want to express my sincere thanks to the Library Society of the World.

Conversants :-) A Participatory Conversation

This is a GREAT idea for continuing your professional development FOR FREE and without any travel! Please read Jill Hurst-Wahl's post detailing this fascinating idea. She is part of the group that is organizing this global event. Here's an intro:

"We invite you to join the movement to create and share information through worldwide coordinated conversations. Library communities and organizations are uniquely poised to employ the latest collaborative resources; the conversations that result from these collaborations hold great promise for students and practitioners across the information professions. Sharing knowledge and expertise via these collaborative conversations as part of a united effort is both beneficial and necessary, so we invite you lend your voice and join us in this unique event. Become a Conversant!
This effort is spearheaded by R. David Lankes with support from the Information Institute at Syracuse University, librarians and library students."

The post has more details and here is a video explaining the idea. I will be following this closely:


Introducing Conversants from R. David Lankes on Vimeo.

Google Celebrates Spring AND Eric Carle

googleericcarlespring09, originally uploaded by Slzimm1.

Cool! Google is celebrating the first day of spring today by using a design by Eric Carle. Here's an article with more details. What a nice surprise to see this logo today (Google is my home page, of course!).

Miller Branch Library "Terror in the Stacks"

Gotta love the ingenuity and creativity of the folks at Howard County Library's Miller Branch:

Computer Hardware in Plain English

Common Craft has done it again... Love their videos. This one is "a short explanation of the basic parts of computers and what they do to make computers work. Focuses on the Hard Drive, RAM and Processor."

WebJunction's 23 Things Summit

WebJunction put on one of the best webinars I have attended yesterday. Check out their page in reference to the 23 Things Summit. They had a question and answer style dialog with those who have done staff development learning using social collaboration tools = Learning2.0. This is something I hope to do here one day, so I've been following these examples for awhile. It was nice to have a big gathering in one spot to glean even more information.

This was one of WJ's biggest webinars to date with over 200 people in attendance. The latest trend in webinars is people twittering the event at the same time using a hashtag so everyone can reference the tweets. See the tweets from this event here. There were over 25 pages full of tweets and we trended at the top of twitter for awhile. Between that and the chat log in the webinar and listening to the presenters and taking notes on our intranet wiki at the same time, by the end of 2 hours - I was exhausted. But what a great experience! Be sure to check out all of the resources on WebJunction related to this inspiring online event.