25 Ways Libraries Can Serve Book Groups

Lots of fun ideas. Others ideas that might be useful too:

1. Check out your shelves for sets of 6-10 bestsellers from a year or two ago. Create book club bags that hold a bunch of copies as well as the publishers reading guide.
2. Have a book club idea blog from your library shared by the whole system.
3. Set up a chat room or Facebook or Ning group for book clubs in your library area for folks to share ideas and discussions.
4. Popular book for clubs? Make sure you you link to Syndetics or Amazon reviews as well as the publisher's reading guide.
5. Don't forget to do a nuche club like a guy's club, teen club, mom's club, etc.
6. Start a virtual club that doeasn't need to meet in person - perfect for the housebound, disabled, or busy working parents, etc.
7. Check out author videos online, in Syndetics or YouTube and use them to promote your club support.

Stephen

"In March of 2008, someone – probably in India – bought a mobile telephone. By itself, that wouldn’t be particularly noteworthy, yet it represented a watershed: the halfway mark of humanity’s accelerating interconnection. Over 3.5 billion mobile subscribers, or one person in two, are wired into the global network. Most of these people live in the “developing” countries, where incomes average just a few dollars a day. Desperately poor by the standards of the “developed” world, why would these people waste their meager resources on something that, to most of us, seems little more than a useful toy?"

"For the nearly two hundred thousand years of human presence on Earth, our lives have been bounded by how far we could throw our voices."

A nice thinking piece.

Stephen

"The U.S. Department of Commerce Ranked 55 industry sectors by their level of IT intensiveness. Education was ranked number 55 — below coal mining."

See it here.

Learning to change, Changing to Learn

It is worth a big discussion:

Report Shows Stunning Failures in High-School Graduation Rates - Chronicle.com
"In 17 of the nation’s 50 largest cities, less than half of the students who entered high school in 2003 ended up graduating. In Detroit, which has the lowest graduation rate of the top 50 cities, not even one in four students finished high school."

Stephen

Stephen

SirsiDynix Institute Announces Upcoming Webinars

“Open Libraries” theme continues in spring and summer 2008"

HUNTSVILLE, Ala., May 9, 2008 – The SirsiDynix Institute, a forum for professional development in the library community, announced its webinar schedule for late spring and summer 2008. In keeping with the SirsiDynix Institute’s mission to help grow the skills of library professionals, the SirsiDynix Institute will focus on “Open Libraries.” The theme centers on the “openness” that characterizes successful libraries — open partnerships, open approaches, open technologies, open dialog and open communities.

The following webinars are scheduled over the course of the summer, including:

· “Trends in e-Learning: What Does It Mean for Libraries?” on May 21, with Frank Cervone, professor of education and director of the Library, Information and Media Studies program at Chicago State University. Cervone will focus on how availability and interoperability are changing the way e-learning is being delivered as well how developments in open access as well as social networking are changing the way e-learning occurs.

· “Beyond Web 2.0: Taking the Social Read-Write Web to the Enterprise Level” on June 13, with Marshall Breeding, director for innovative technologies and research at the Jean and Alexander Heard Library at Vanderbilt University. Breeding will give his view of how libraries can take Web 2.0 technologies to the next level and integrate them into their core automation infrastructure to better support their strategic missions.

· “Video on the Web: A Primer” in on July 15 with David Lee King, digital branch and services manager at Topeka and Shawnee Library in Kansas. King will teach attendees to explore how libraries are using video for outreach and learning through a variety of case studies, discover tips on what types of content work best for different types of libraries, and learn what to consider when planning for and implementing videocasting at your library.

· “Tame the Web” in August, Michael Stephens, assistant professor at Dominican University’s Graduate School of Library and Information Sciences, and a leading library blogger. Stephens will share his insights on open libraries.

“We have a fabulous schedule for this quarter and are thrilled to have so many well-respected industry leaders willing to share their time and expertise with the SirsiDynix Institute,” said Stephen Abram. “Their willingness to give to the industry in this way is integral to the mission of the SirsiDynix Institute.”

Upcoming SirsiDynix Institute events will be posted on the SirsiDynix Institute website, www.sirsidynixinstitute.com. Archives, including podcasts and Windows Media files are also available to revisit after the event at the SirsiDynix Institute website. All SirsiDynix Institute sessions are scheduled for 11:00 a.m. Eastern Time, unless otherwise specified. Additional special and international events will be announced throughout the year.

# # #

About the SirsiDynix Institute
The SirsiDynix institute was founded in 2003 and is funded by SirsiDynix, the global leader in strategic technology solutions. The SirsiDynix Institute is a forum for professional development in the library community. Monthly webinars, the SirsiDynix Institute Executive Conference and other events provide librarians with access to industry leaders and a forum to keep up to date on relevant issues and trends impacting libraries. The mission of the SirsiDynix Institute is to support librarianship and advance the work of librarians around the world. The focus of the SirsiDynix Institute is on library issues, not products. More information on the SirsiDynix Institute is available at www.sirsidynixinstitute.com.

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION:

Melanie Sollid
1.256.704.7127
melanie.sollid@sirsidynix.com

Reality 2.0: Transforming Ourselves & Our Association

Lots of fun there at Rutgers and talking to the profs and students too.

Stephen

Technology Watch: What's New, What's Coming, and What You Need to Know

Mystic CT, great name!

Stephen

I did a presentation for them in West Palm Beach on The Ftuure Learners Will See.

Pretty place too.

Stephen

My presentation was called The Future of Libraries.

They also had the CEO of the World Future Society there. Cool.

Stephen

Trends in e-learning: What does it mean for libraries?
Date : May 21, 2008
Start Time : 11 a.m. Eastern
Length : 1 hour

While in some sectors e-learning may seem "old hat", the world of e-learning continues to change at a rapid pace. With newer technologies such as mobile devices, technologies such as Second Life, litigation in the e-learning vendor arena, and evolving standards, e-learning remains a dynamic area that we have to keep our eye on. And while many libraries have fully developed e-learning environments, many are just getting beginning to explore the possibilities. This workshop will focus on issues related to how availability and interoperability are changing the way e-learning is being delivered as well how developments in open source and open access as well as social networking are changing the way e-learning occurs.

Frank Cervone —Professor of Education and Director of the Library, Information, and Media Studies program, Chicago State University

The author of numerous articles and four books on topics related to information technology, he writes a regular column for OCLC Systems and Services: International Digital Library Perspectives and has been an invited speaker at library conferences in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Australia, and Brazil. He was a member of the NISO working group on metasearch and is the past chair of the CARLI (Consortium of Academic and Research Libraries in Illinois) Learning Objects Task Force. He has a MSEd with a specialization in online teaching and learning from the California State University, an MA in Information Technology Management from DePaul University and a Ph.D. in Management and Information Systems from Northcentral University.

Register here.

Stephen

Mark Davis, Google's Senior International Software Architect posted to the Official Google blog that Unicode is now surpassing most other codes (ASCII, etc.) on the web. This is a great thing as the web becomes more multilingual.

"Web pages can use a variety of different character encodings, like ASCII, Latin-1, or Windows 1252, or Unicode. Most encodings can only represent a few languages, but Unicode will handle anything from Chinese to French to Arabic. We have long used Unicode as the internal format for all the text we search: any other encoding is first converted to Unicode for processing. So we regularly update to each new version of Unicode (and relevant related standards like CLDR and BCP 47) to make sure we are current."

Uptick in native Unicode webpages

"You can see a long-term decline in pages encoded in ASCII (unaccented letters A through Z). More recently, there's been a significant drop in the use of encodings covering only Western European letters (ASCII and a few accented letters like Ä, Ç, and Ø). We're seeing similar declines in other language-specific encodings. Unicode, on the other hand, is showing a sharp increase in usage."

Of course Unicode is a very important part of any ILS/OPAC and.user experience strategy.

Stephen

So What Does Experience Actually Look Like?

Hope you find it interesting.

Stephen

Either way, for libraries, there aren't many free search engine web harvests left and all suffer the influence of SEO.

Stephen

"The Public Library Funding & Technology Access Study gathers a wide range of data related to computer and Internet access in U.S. public libraries – including the number of computers, barriers to high-speed Internet access, Internet services and trainings available, and funding for technology.

Starting in 2008, the study research team will develop and publish topical briefs related to issues affecting communities’ access to technology in our public libraries. These documents are not intended to be comprehensive but rather to share key findings from the largest and longest-running study of Internet connectivity in libraries. At least two issues briefs will be published online every year.

Library staff are encouraged to use these briefing papers as educational tools with community stakeholders, including elected officials, funders and program partners, as needed to raise awareness of the specific – and sometimes unique – concerns of libraries around technology deployment. Staff may also use this format as a template for providing local data and examples related to a given topic.

The research team also invites your feedback about future topics we should consider and additional tools that would be useful in raising awareness around your library’s technology needs. Please write Larra Clark at lclark@ala.org."

Good work,

Stephen

What would the ideal report contain?

How do you plan to use the information?

What do you expect to discover?

What would surprise you?

How do you want me to share my findings? (Written report, Sharepoint site, PowerPoint, links to or printed articles, etc.)

How would you like the information organized?

What do you already know that you can share with me? (Emails, letters, notes, articles, websites, etc.)

What keywords would you use in searching? Share as many variations of a concept as possible.

I always ask what is the deadline--one hour, one day, one week? If they respond one of the first two, then I let them know the possibility of that given my current work load.

How current should the information be? (x days, x months, x years)

Urgency and/or impact on the organization?

Would you like to review abstracts/ tables of contents before I purchase or borrow any items (if they are available)?

Who do you want the information delivered to?

Is the information for someone else too?

Is there some way to delvier it that will make it easier for you to use the information?

Neat, eh? It's always useful to remember those old reference interview classes and skills.

Stephen

100 eLearning Articles and White Papers

If you're interested in that side of the information world, it's a pretty good list and it is all in one place and linked. Cool and helpful.

Stephen