Never Forget the Attachment Again!

Great advice from the Tricks of the Trade Blog so that you never forget that attachment again!

"If you are sending an email with an attachment, add the attachment first, then compose the message, and then add email addresses tothe send line. Now there's no chance you'll have to send the ever-popular "whoops, forgot to attach the file" follow-up.

In fact, it's a good practice to always put the email addresses of the recipients in last, to ensure that an errant carriage return or mouseclick won't fire off the message half-baked. "

Coffee Shop at Elizabethtown!

This is very exciting news for the community of Elizabethtown. The Elizabethtown Public Library will be opening a Coffee Shop very soon. Be sure to check out their Coffee Shop at the Library page for more details. Check out more pictures of the beautiful space here. They are going all out! Applause, applause to them - way to be innovative!

Collection Development Tricks

From WebJunction's blog: BlogJunction, a great post about resources for collection development. There is a wealth of information here. I hope you have time to check it out!

Here's the beginning of the post:

"Collection development is an exciting, ongoing process of discovery. According to ALA’s Library Bill of Rights: “Libraries should provide materials and information presenting all points of view.” Sometimes it can be a challenge to find a wide selection of balanced materials. The following resources can help contribute to the collection development process at your library."

Go read more to see all the resources....

A Library Champion Lives Here

I received this the other day on the PA: District Library Centers Mailing List. This is such a great idea and obviously did well in this town:

“A Library Champion Lives Here” – A library in Louisville decided to give all children who read 10 books a “vote for me” type of sign that says “A Library Champion Lives Here.” The children stuck the sign in their yards. Soon signs were springing up in yards all over town.

One parent decided to take a picture of her child next to the sign in her yard. She submitted the digital photo to the library, so the library put it on their website.

Of course, when other parents saw that, they wanted their child’s picture on the website too. Soon digital pictures kept flooding in to the library. So library staff made a rotating display of all the pictures on their homepage.

Now the website is the favorite destination in town, as all the parents and grandparents all want to see their child’s picture on the web."

Go check it out! Just watch the pictures rotate on the home page.

The Life of an IT Employee!

Here's a HILARIOUS Platoon parody of a tough day on the job as IT Personnel. I know, you all would NEVER do this...

WOWIO

From SmartComputing:

A Virtual Library At Your Fingertips

Sometimes, it's just not as easy as we'd like to get to our local library branch to check out a good book. When bad weather strikes or the car's in the shop, you can still find some reading material with the help of Wowio. Wowio is a site that offers hundreds of titles for download, ranging from children's books such as "The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin" to more serious works from Kurt Vonnegut or Chuck Palahniuk. And best of all, it's completely free! You'll need to create an account; once it's created and confirmed, you can download up to three books a da y in PDF (Portable Document Format) form. You'll be lost in a good book in no time!

Just One More Book

Since I'm a new Mommy, I'm finding more and more great resources for parents in the online world (since I've lived there much longer than I've been a Mommy). This podcast is very good, and the website provides lots of great reviews of kids books. Check out Just One More Book - "A podcast about the children's books we love and why we love them - recorded in our favourite coffee shop".

From the About Page of their site:

"Just One More Book is a thrice-weekly podcast which promotes and celebrates literacy and great children’s books.

Each weekday morning, we take a few minutes out of our morning coffee ritual to discuss one of our many favourite children’s books. We also feature weekly interviews with authors, literacy related discussions and audio reviews submitted by our listeners.

Through this podcast and its website, we are building a lively, interactive community linking children’s book authors, illustrators, readers (parents and children) and publishers."

Laugh Out Loud @ Your Library Teen Contest

How exciting - a YouTube contest for teens in the Lancaster County area! Please see the Contest Page for more details.

I had a lot of fun helping Renee Christiansen, Youth Services Coordinator and the YIG group to put all of this together. It's great to see Web 2.0 being put to use in our Library System.

The Seattle Public Library is AMAZING!

While at the Training Institute in Seattle, we had a tour of the Seattle Public Library. This is an amazing building. Truly, a work of art. I got a little camera happy while I was there...

Here's a view of the outside of the building:


Here is the children's area of the library, just gorgeous:

Here is a room where children's programming is held:


Next, some amazing views from within the library. Imagine, a wall of OPACs!:

This one shows a cafe to the left, greenery in the building, and an amazing floor plan:

More OPACs and more information staff counters that are scattered throughout the library:

Looking down from one floor to a lower floor, I think there are 7 or 8 floors all together:

Imagine having this many public machines and a technician staffed there FULL TIME!

Here are the stairs to the staff floor, which is also COMPLETELY red:

Photo op:

They have a world department and the floor itself is a work of art with sayings on it in all the languages of the world:

The same department has quite a selection of foreign periodicals:

Here is the teen center, more RED!

And you can't even believe how they sort the book drop, check it out - all the books come into one location and it's like a factory with conveyor belt and all:







Their auditorium can seat up to 400:

And they have a display showing the amount of items by material type that have checked out that day - impressive:



Just goes to show what a library can really be when the people in the area advocate for libraries!

Spanish Language Outreach Training in Seattle

I had the privilege to attend the Spanish Language Outreach Training Institute in Seattle last week. This is a program coordinated by WebJunction through funding from OCLC and the Gates Foundation. Check out this great post on BlogJunction that describes the week and its purpose.

What a joy to get to know the 2 other trainers for the state of PA - Ineavelle Ruiz, the Migrant Program Coordinator/Assistant at the Northeast Branch of the Reading Public Library in Berks County and Susana Baumann, the Director of LCSWorldwide Language and Cultural Services, a company she started in 1996 as a home-based part-time business, as well as the state coordinator, Claudia Koenig from Commonwealth Libraries. We've become quite the team getting everything together for the workshops in PA. Here we are with Yolanda Cuesta, the Institute Facilitator/Curriculum Developer:

And here is the crew of 30 from many states:

Check out the flickr set of many photos from the week.