The PLA Blog | Official Blog of the Public Library Association
ALA 2009 Unconference
Greetings! I’m Anne Heidemann, Children’s, Tween, and Teen Services Department Head for the Canton Public Library in Canton, Michigan. I’ve posted here a few times before. I was lucky enough to be one of the 75 attendees at Friday’s ALA Unconference, which was created as part of ALA President Jim Rettig’s Creating Connections initiatives. As [...]
Visit the Oak Park Library, Illinois
Today I visited the Main Library in Oak Park, Illinois. Thanks to @ebattaglia from the IT department for the tour, and thanks to @showsomemoxie for setting it up. The Oak Park Main Library is a huge new building: 104,000 square feet and 3 floors. There are two other branch libraries that I didn’t get to, [...]
Serving Gen X and Gen Y
“Millenials Rising: Programming and Collections for the Next Generation of Library Users” Sunday July 12 Presented by Jennifer Czajka, Monica Harris and Monica Harris of Oak Park Public Library, Oak Park, IL Gen X (that’s me!) and Gen Y, otherwise known as millenials, are shaped by popular culture, education, marketing ,and technology and are in [...]
LITA’s Top Technology Trends
Six panelists from a variety of libraries in the U.S. and the Netherlands mused about the future of technology in libraries yesterday at the 2009 American Library Association Conference in Chicago. What will truly happen, of course, is not clear. They would agree. Libraries are in transformation and in danger of being just left behind. [...]
Leadership = Vision + Communication + Empowerment
Saturday, July 11, 2009, 9:15 a.m. (Part of the Empowerment Conference) Wow! I successfully caught a shuttle bus! I rode to the McCormick Center! I got my badge holder! (they were out of them at the “satellite” reservation location. I found the 9:15 session I wanted to attend, early, and there was plenty of room [...]
Space is the Place
“Exciting NASA Materials for Libraries” was a fantastic program! I love to hear scientists talk because they are so enthusiastic about what they do and as a result many of them are great at outreach. ALA Public Programs Office is sponsoring an exhibit in conjunction with the Space Telescope Science Institute (STSI), Smithsonian, and NASA [...]
Booklist Books for Youth Forum: Celebrating Lincoln.
Disclaimer: I am not a youth services librarian. I couldn’t even play one on TV. But this event on the evening of Friday July 10, was a fun and nice way to begin the ALA conference, for me. Three authors and one editor talked about the creation of their books about Lincoln. How fitting for [...]
An Hour with Gregory Maguire, Author of Wicked
Gregory Maguire, author of Wicked, Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, and Mirror, Mirror, opened the ALA Auditorium Speaker Series with a very personal talk “Playing with Stolen Property.” Readers of his books know that he reuses characters from old children’s literature in writing new stories. His roots for storytelling childhood go back to when he [...]
Safety in the Library
Hello! My name is Ericka Dow and I serve as circulation supervisor at the Lake Jackson Branch of the LeRoy Collins Leon County Public Library System and I am happy to be blogging for PLA along with the other event bloggers. My only ALA conference before this was DC in 2007. It was a blast [...]
YouMedia leads on the path to geeking out
I thought I’d seen it all when I saw the plans for the Mediaspace in Aarhus, Denmark- but here in Chicago new media literacy needs are being addressed at the public library as well! Yesterday after a day of wandering around at the ALA conference, I visited the brand-new Youmedia space and was pleased to [...]
