PLA Blog

A project of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), conducted in cooperation with the American Library Association:

Picturing America, an exciting new initiative from the National Endowment for the Humanities, brings masterpieces of American art into classrooms and libraries nationwide. Through this innovative program, students and citizens will gain a deeper appreciation of our country’s history and character through the study and understanding of its art.

Participating institutions will receive:

• Forty large, high-quality color reproductions of the selected masterpieces (24” x 36”).
• A Teachers Resource Book providing a wide range of ideas and background information to support educators using the works of art in core subject areas.
• Additional resources and lesson plans available through PicturingAmerica.neh.gov.

You can peruse these materials and apply online. Applications are due by April 15, 2008; public libraries, K-12 schools, and home school consortia are eligible.

OK, so it’s more than a day. But really, it takes more than a day to pack in this much legislative action!

National Library Legislative Day (NLLD) is a two-day event in which people who care about libraries participate in advocacy and issue training sessions, interact with Capitol Hill insiders, and visit congressional member offices to ask Congress to pass legislation that supports libraries.

A $20 registration fee covers 3 whole days of congressional collaboration, including:

• The Lobbying 101 pre-conference
• A briefing day at the Holiday Inn on the Hill
• A Congressional Reception
• A day of congressional visits on the Hill

NLLD is an excellent opportunity to lobby for your local library with your national representatives! For more information, visit the ALA Washington Office online. The registration deadline is April 4, 2008.

The Midwinter meeting in Philly is fast approaching! If you’d like the 411 on committee meetings, visit the handy chart on the PLA web site, sorted alphabetically by committee name.

We are also still recruiting bloggers for the conference. No experience is required, but great writing skills are desirable. Drop us a line through the contact form with your name, title, library, and blog URL (if you feel like sharing), and we’ll get you all set up. If you have submitted your information to me already, you’ll be hearing from me very soon.

Are you heading to Midwinter? What are you looking forward to most? Least? Feel free to leave us a comment and let us know. And don’t forget to hit the 2008 Midwinter Meeting Wiki when planning your trip!

Are you going to the Midwinter meeting in Philly? Looking for an interesting new way to document your conference experience and share your thoughts? Consider volunteering as a conference blogger for the PLA Blog. No experience is necessary! We even a practice blog to get you acclimated before you head off to the real thing.

If you’re interested, drop us a line through our contact form as soon as possible, including your full name, title, library or organization and blog URL (if you have one/feel like sharing it), so we can get you all set up.

For our readers who can’t join us in The City of Brotherly Love, keep an eye on the blog for reports from sessions, meetings, parties, and more!

ALA is encouraging public libraries to participate in the 2007-2008 Public Library Funding and Technology Access online survey. The survey provides an important opportunity for libraries to share information on computer and Internet resources and infrastructure, as well as funding, technology training and other uses of public libraries, such as providing public access technology centers in their communities. The current year’s online survey, available at http://survey.pnmi.com, will be available through Nov. 25, 2007.

“This survey is vital to all of us-data from past studies have been used in Congressional testimony, by the U.S. Census Bureau and by national and local media,” said ALA Office for Research & Statistics Director Denise M. Davis. “The success of the survey rests largely on the overall and individual state response rates. We encourage all public libraries to log on and help us create the most complete picture possible of technology in our nation’s public libraries. Our thanks also to all the libraries that already have completed the survey.”

The study, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and ALA, continues work begun by John Carlo Bertot and Charles R. McClure in 1994. It provides important information for policymakers, the ALA and library advocates regarding public library Internet and public computing needs and issues.

More information, including results from the 2007 study, is available online at http://www.ala.org/plinternetfunding.

The executive board of the Association of Library Trustees and Advocates (ALTA) agreed at the 2007 fall planning session to work with board members from Friends of Libraries U.S.A. (FOLUSA) to determine whether and how a partnership might benefit both groups and, most importantly, America’s libraries. ALTA is one of the American Library Association’s (ALA) oldest divisions with its inception in 1890. FOLUSA, a younger organization, began within ALA in 1979 and became an independent organization based in Philadelphia in 1984.
“This is a bold new step for ALTA,” said President Don Roalkvam. “Our association developed a sweeping new plan for the future last year and this potential opportunity meshes well with our vision to grow membership, create new partnerships, and strengthen our voice for advocacy.”
During the next year, members of both organizations’ boards will work together to design possible governance structures that embrace both the Trustee and the Friends sectors, determine a viable dues structure that encourages continued and growing membership, and find ways to engage corporate members to join them in advocacy.
“This is certainly an idea whose time has come,” said Emily Sheketoff, executive director of ALA’s Washington Office. Our most powerful advocates for libraries are those that support them and use them – in other words, Trustees, Friends, and the library’s corporate community.”
(more)

As the planning continues, the boards of both organizations are committed to ensuring that the distinctive and important roles both groups play in the library community are preserved and that benefits to Trustees and Friends will continue to grow. “I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to work with ALTA as interim director,” said Sally G. Reed, executive director of FOLUSA. “I honestly believe that libraries are strengthened when Trustees, Friends and members of the library corporate community join forces to enhance and preserve our libraries.”
Immediate plans are underway to work with the Public Library Association, the Library Administration and Management Association, and the Association of College and Research Libraries with the goal of bringing all trustee boards and Friends groups into the new partnership.
FOLUSA is a national organization with approximately 3,500 Friends group, Trustee, Foundation and individual members representing hundreds of thousands of library supporters. For more than 25 years FOLUSA has offered training, support, and idea sharing for library supporters around the country.

Interested in the connection between libraries and the publishing world? The Women’s National Book Association sponsors the WNBA Eastman Grant offers a grant of up to $750 for a librarian to take a course or participate in an institute devoted to aspects of publishing as a profession.

Application guidelines (there is no official form, but there is a list of materials you must submit) are available on the WNBA Eastman Grant page of the ALA web site. You need to have an MLS (or MLS equivalent) and have two years of post-master’s work to apply. Applications are due November 1, so apply today! Winners will be announced at the 2008 ALA Midwinter Meeting in Philadelphia.

Kristen, children’s librarian, here. This is my first time writing for the PLA Blog. I’ll be attending a number of sessions and events over the next four days and look forward to sharing them with you. Traveling, for me, always starts out with a shoe crisis, especially when I’m headed to a conference. I covered all my bases by over packing; confident I was prepared for everything. (I even remembered to pay the bill I had to before I left.) Of course, nothing ever is perfect so about halfway here I realized I’d forgotten a belt. And then I hit horrendous traffic in the middle of D.C. And then I missed my turn and spent about 45 more minutes driving around, trying to find my hotel. (One of the best things about my hotel: I didn’t even have to make an extra trip to the conference center to pick up my book and badge because there’s a handy desk just downstairs.)

Now, here I sit in wonderful air conditioning, digesting my thoughts on the documentary The Hollywood Librarian. Interviews with librarians were interwoven with film clips to celebrate the profession. The film made me laugh, nearly cry and get angry. The best bits were, perhaps, the brief highlights of different specialties of librarianship, sending up cheers from the audience. It is the audience that made the movie special. There’s nothing else like being in a crowd of librarians, the inspiration and camaraderie more than make up for all the hassles of travel.

Many of the emails of interest I’ve received about our Call for Bloggers for the ALA Annual conference have asked, “What does blogging for PLA entail?” Here’s the basics on how PLA blogs conferences, and how you can be involved.

Who can be a PLA conference blogger?
As you might expect, our preference is for public librarians. However, if you are a Friend, trustee, paraprofessional, a library school student, or even a library volunteer who is attending the conference, we’d like to add your diverse perspectives to the mix.

Do conference bloggers need to have a blog, or previous blogging experience?
No, and no. Not only are we into diversification of perspectives, we also like to offer conference blogging as an entry-level experience to the uninitiated. Our blog is powered by WordPress, which is easy to use, and we try to get people set up far enough in advance to answer questions or concerns. I’m even working on setting up a private, practice blog for newbies to help them ramp up on their posting skills before the conference, if they need it.

What do you want bloggers to cover?
Our focus is on the entire conference experience with public librarians in mind, so we encourage our conference bloggers to cover preconference workshops, sessions, meetings, lunches, dinners, receptions, interviews, with pictures, text, and audio recordings (we often podcast interviews and recordings of PLA-sponsored sessions). You can even cover sessions and events sponsored by other divisions, if you can make them relevant to public librarians somehow. We do have a few limitations, which are outlined in the guidelines each conference blogger should read before getting started, but otherwise, it’s pretty open.

How many posts are required of each conference blogger?
This is really up to each conference blogger, since we have no official minimum or cap. We like to see at least one post per day from each blogger, to encourage timely conference reporting, but if a blogger decides to save up their content and post them all on the same day at the end, that’s OK, too.

Is there a required length for posts?
No. The key to good blog posts is content that is easy to read on the screen, which usually comes down to clearly written short prose and a wise use of bullet points (taking a nod from Jakob Nielsen). A post can be as simple as a picture with a caption, or as involved as a 6 paragraph mini-essay. For examples, check out our archives.

When do conference bloggers start writing?
Conference bloggers can begin with their introductory post as soon as they start traveling to the conference, if they want, since part of the conference flavor is documenting the journey to and from the meeting. Conference bloggers also have 1 week from the end of the conference to post any wrap-up content, since we know that the conference is fast and furious, and some content just waits until bloggers arrive home.

This totally sounds doable. How do I sign up?
Use the Contact Us link on the PLA Blog site to send us your name, your title, your library/organization, your email address, and your blog URL (if you have one). You’ll receive information on how to proceed from there.

Hope this enlightens the mystery that is conference blogging for PLA, and encourages you to take the plunge and give it a try!

Big congratulations to the PPO for the launch of their spiffy new blog, the Public Programs Post. In the past, the PLA Blog has highlighted information, programs, and events from the Public Programs Office here, and we hope to continue to bring you highlights from their new blog now and again. In the meantime, if you have a feed reader, be sure to visit their blog and subscribe to their feed!