Keeping up with Library Science

April 12^th was National Library Workers Day, an occasion designated by the American Library Association (ALA) to recognize the individuals who work at the many different jobs that are all part of the library profession.  Their job descriptions are ever-evolving, as technology and community expectations have evolved.  Keeping up is a job in itself, one to which Ridgefield Library staff are dedicated.  Here is a sampling of some of the workshops, webinars, conferences and other professional development opportunities our staff have attended in just the past few months.

Pinterest for Libraries

Readers’ Advisory Roundtable

Using Pop Culture to Create Great Library Programs

Getting Started with Digitization

Building Great Programs for Patrons in their 20s and 30s

Retinkering Makerspaces

Learners as Leaders: Student-Directed STEM Programs in Libraries

Building the Digital Branch

Fueling the Next Generation of Opportunity for Young Children’s Love of and Engagement in Reading

Learning Python

The Digital Shift

Book Club Recommendations

Protecting Patron Privacy

How to Build and Promote your Digital Collections

Customizing Making: How Libraries Are Responding to Creating Opportunities for Participatory Learning

Stay tuned to see how all we have learned about will find its way into programs and services here at the Ridgefield Library!

Report on Emerging Leaders participation

Here's a report from Geri Diorio, our Teen Services Librarian and Children's Services head, on an extraodinary opportunity she has had this past year.

For the past 6 months, I have been participating in the first American Library Association (ALA) Emerging Leaders program, created to enable young and new-to-the-profession librarians to get on the fast track to professional leadership. The program accepted only 100 librarians for this first session. Those selected were required to attend two conferences for leadership training, complete a group project, and serve on an ALA committee for two years.

The group met for the first time at the ALA Midwinter conference in Seattle in January 2007, where the focus was on leadership and team dynamics within the association and in the workplace. Presenters and mentors were drawn from the ranks of the profession’s most experienced and inspiring consultants and practitioners.

We were divided into smaller groups of three or four to work on a project for the next six months. Communicating through conference calls and e-mails, my group chose to explore “what technologies will most affect libraries in the next five years?” And instead of making up a static list, we decided to use the more dynamic tool of a wiki, where we’d link to articles on new technologies that are impacting libraries as well as established technologies that are being used in new ways. Our wiki is called “Tech Casting” and can be found at
http://wikis.ala.org/tech_casting/index.php/Main_Page.

In June at the ALA Annual conference, the entire group once again took part in leadership seminars, this time on principles and practices in three important areas: collaboration, conflict and ethics. We also presented a “poster session,” attended by hundreds of conference participants, which explained our group work and showed off the wiki in real time on two laptops.

My service portion of the program will be fulfilled by serving for the next two years as the intern for the ALA Awards committee, which is responsible, among others, for the Newbery and Caldecott prizes.

I’d like to express my gratitude to the library staff and the Friends of the Ridgefield Library for their support of my participation in this program.

While many Ridgefielders were away on vacation last week, some of the Ridgefield Library staff also went out–of-town, but for continuing education opportunities rather than vacation. This week and next we’ll share a little of what we learned.

A couple of us went to a conference entitled Computers and Libraries, where the theme was Beyond Library 2.0: Building Communities, Connections and Strategies. Library 2.0 is the application of the phenomenon known as Web 2.0 to the library setting. Web 2.0 is the catch phrase describing new methods of online communication and information delivery that encourage interactivity, user participation and collaborative creation of content. Wikipedia and Amazon’s reader reviews are two well-known examples, but the possibilities for the use of the myriad new technologies in libraries as well are extensive and exciting.

Would you like to be able to add your reviews and ratings to items in our online library catalog?

Or get an e-mail reminder BEFORE your books are due, helping you to get them back on time?

How about a blog where members of any book group that has read a particular title can post their impressions and discussion questions for other groups to share?

Or perhaps podcasts of author talks or YouTube videos of story times for those who can’t get to the Library for one reason or another?