The Discover Earth exhibition will focus on local earth science topics—such as weather, water cycle, and ecosystem changes—as well as a global view of our changing planet. The primary message of the exhibition is that the global environment changes – and is changed by – the local environment of all exhibition hosts’ communities. Interactive, multimedia displays will allow exhibit visitors to interact with digital information in a dynamic way, encouraging new perspectives on our planet. Discover Earth will tour from January 2012 to December 2013, visiting each of the 10 selected sites for a period of eight weeks. The exhibition requires approximately 500-750 square feet of space for optimal display. Each site will be awarded a grant of $1,000 to support public programs related to the exhibition. Each host library will be asked to join a national Community of Practice (CoP), accessible here. http://community.discoverexhibits.org. For more information about Discover Earth, STAR_Net and the CoP, visit www.ala.org/discoverearth.

In that vein, I am going to present to you a summary of their top ten benefits of tough economic times in reverse order;

10. Refresh Your Organization- This is the opportunity to look at the positions in your organization to see if the needs can be met through making positions more diversified or by changing the roles and services provided by the positions. You should be asking yourself if there is a need for the position, how else it can be filled, what else can be done? How much of the work is really relevant and how much is just filler? Its important to make the positions more fulfilling and satisfying by utilizing the talent that the employees.

9. Developing Staff Skills – Tough times can give libraries the opportunity to learn and grow from each other. Instead of paying for coaches and consultants, you can utilize the knowledge of your staff to train other staff members. Its important to allow staff to cross train other staff in a various roles and positions to give them the opportunity to grow and help people on multiple levels. Allowing staff to work together to teach each other can also help staff work more effective in teams, improve moral, or to work more collaboratively.

8. Make New Friends- In the good times, all these good friends existed out there but we weren’t talking to them. Now, in the hard times, we need to renew these friendships and make new friends. It’s important that you rely on local organizations and that you encourage them to rely on you for the resources that both can share. For example, the library can supply the community space for a food or hunger organization and the organization can provide the program.

7. Finally Write That Grant – Get someone who has an affinity for writing, has attention to detail, and most importantly has an interest in writing a grant. It would be helpful to get someone on your staff to help review state and federal grants so that they get trained (for free) about the grant writing process. You can also utilize volunteers who are looking to keep their work experience solid while they are unemployed to write grants.

6. Say It Better (Improve Communications) – good old fashion face-to-face communication. These times we have gone through have created so much fear and libraries are relearning the importance of communicating effectively to staff. Simple things, like leaving your door open, can help staff change their perception of you.

5. Kill Mission Creep – The most important skill a manager has is to demonstrate confidence with a clear message and knowing what they want. You want staff to get behind your initiatives and know where the library is headed. It’s important to revisit the strategic plan to make sure that all staff is working towards the same goals. Bad things start to happen if the only thing your working towards is keeping the doors open. Figure out what is it you really want to do and do it really well instead of trying to do to many things part way. In order to accomplish this, you should figure out how to say no to things that lie outside of goals of the strategic plan.

4. Enjoy Spring Cleaning (Leaner Facilities) – There is a lot you can do to fix up and change your facility for little to no money. Take this opportunity to clean out and throw away what you don’t need and to create a leaner space. Remember the adage, there is a place for everything and everything in its place and having too much “stuff” around the building leads to less efficiency. Explain the why’s of why a leaner space is a better space. For example, decrease the number of flyers on the desks and teach staff to be better salesman with face-to-face interactions.

3. Weed’em and Reep – Many libraries are weeding significant portions of their non-fiction collections to make room for more computers and chairs or other resources that patrons may need at a higher level. Perform a turnover analysis on all of your collections and anything that is low should be considered for downsizing.

2. Meet New Needs and Create New Users – Its important to have fun and change with the needs of the community to gain a new set of users. If people had an experience that is relevant to their lives, its more likely that they will vote in favor of the library when it comes time to go to the taxpayers for funding. We have created many rules to preclude patrons from using the facilities and we should be starting to change to more welcoming spaces.

1. Adjust Your Attitude – A fish stinks from the head down. Managers and leaders who are up against the challenges of the economic downturn and are negative will not inspire staff to rise above the challenges to solve the problems. By solving the problems from a positive space the manager creates a sense of team and comradely. Even if you’re not in a leadership position its possible to lead through your attitude towards staff and situations.

In both instances I encouraged friends and partners from the community to think of this as THEIR program- not the LIBRARY’s. This is an important component if you want serious, lasting buy-in from the community. The library building is public space that the community can use for whatever they want, provided it fits within the mission and scope of your library. The librarian is the connector; the one who enables flexibility, organizes the space and provides the information resources to support the program. Looking at things this way- essentially turning the librarian role into that of a production coordinator- allows you to have self-sustaining programs and it keeps you from going crazy pouring energy into topics and themes that you might not even understand.

Here’s what I’ve been up to, with the assistance of some very talented and motivated Brooklynites:

1) The Bushwick Reading Series

Website
Facebook Group

The Bushwick Reading Series takes place in the basement of the Bushwick Library on the second Saturday of every month from 3:00 to 5:00 PM.

The Series is co-curated by Bushwick residents Niina Pollari and Parker Phillips. The series features local writers of poetry, fiction, and non-ficiton while it creates an evolving book list for the Bushwick library. Every month, the readers share five book titles that they’ve loved or found influential and the library offers those books for checkout at the event. The library also maintains a semi-permanent shelf for these materials so that fans of the reading series can find them and share them.

2) The Past, Present, and Future of Food: Bushwick, Brooklyn
A (n Urban) (Farm) Salon

Website
Facebook Event

What is this place, Bushwick, Brooklyn? At one point it was all farmland, and (with a little help from Queens) farmers raised enough food to feed the metropolis that New York City was already in the 18th and 19th century. There were farms everywhere. But today? There are trees here and there, maybe a couple of gardens in the middle of buildings, you can see dirt some places, but food is not made here. Food can be bought – anything you can imagine from around the world can be found here – but grown?

On March 7, as part of the Arts in Bushwick SITE Festival, we will explore how Brooklyn and Bushwick in particular went from being so rich an agricultural community to the desert it is today, and we’ll talk about what people can and ARE doing to grow food here. How did it happen that all the land was developed? What kind of food can you get to eat here now? What’s made here? Is it good for you in any way, shape, or form? Do Twinkies count as food? How about Cup-O-Noodles? Is ketchup a vegetable?

Read more from Gabe McMackin…

How about it public librarians?  Are you ready to act as production coordinators, tying together your community’s ideas and energy, your library media and resources, and the seemingly boundless connectivity the internet offers?  I’m pretty sure it is the future of public librarianship…

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a little something about how librarians ought to look outside there profession for inspiration from time to time after I read about how the Walker Art Center is using iTunes U to distribute Walker content.  There is a flip side to this as well.  Public libraries and librarians are innovators as well, and it is equally important for us to write about, present, and share our work with other audiences.  Not only is this good advocacy, but it is very much in the spirit of librarianship to share the work you do.

Yesterday I got an email from my friend Lauren who works at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. The Exploratorium is “is an experimental, hands-on museum designed to spark curiosity—regardless of your age or familiarity with science.”, and the place really is awesome.  Lauren’s question:

“We’re looking to create programming for the lost museum-user demographic: 18-35 yr old single folk.  Unfortunately, research at the intersection of Adult Education and Museum Studies is pretty scarce, and information about incorporating social networking is non-existent in the museum journal literature (I’d love to find actual data about social networking).  Have you done research into getting 18-35 yr olds into libraries?  I think it could be translated to the museum setting pretty easily.  In a different vein of how I’m thinking about this project – can you think of program models that might be applicable?  Gaming and all that in the library has been successful, of course, but are there concrete models that might be helpful?”

I want to put this out there for everyone to react to and hopefully comment on.  Librarians, share your experience and expertise in these matters!  This is also a perfect opportunity for me to post about an awesome project aimed at that very demographic coming out of the Oak Park Public Library.  Maybe this can serve as inspiration for Lauren and the Exploratorium.  Sorry, this post is going to get long, but I’ve been waiting to find the right time to write about Genre-X and finally, the time has come.  Genre-X in their own words:

Genre X evolved because we identified patrons in their twenties and thirties as being a user group that we needed to target more effectively. We began brainstorming in the summer of 2007 to figure out the best course of action to meet their needs and naturally a book discussion was one of the first things we thought of. There were a few strong factors that we took into consideration before making our decision to hold the discussion off site and at 8pm:

* Many people work later than the usual 9-5 day and would need extra time to make it to the discussion.

* Some of these people might not even have time to make it home before attending. While refreshments are always appreciated, we thought it would be great if we could offer them the chance to have dinner while discussing their book.

* Due to the overwhelming number of activities/events that might appeal to this user base on any given day in the Chicagoland area, we realized that we would need to create a discussion group that would offer intellectual stimulation as well as an opportunity for fun social networking. We also knew at the time that this demographic was not heavily represented at many of our programs and that the library might not be

the most desirable location for them to meet in this fashion.

Thus we decided to “meet our patrons where they’re at” and hold our discussions in a variety of bars in the area. At first we were rotating for every discussion, but quickly we realized that most bars are a little

too loud for holding a solid book discussion. We were also more concerned with the venue’s proximity to public transportation in the beginning, but eventually we identified this as being less important than the venue itself. The Snug is a small room inside Molly Malone’s and has truly turned out to be the ideal location for our discussion. And it is less than half a mile away from the nearest El stop, which equates to about a 15 minute walk.

Before we even planned our first discussion we also brainstormed about how we would choose to publicize it. We knew from the start that the book discussion was probably just the beginning of what we hoped would evolve into a more diverse selection of twenties and thirties programming, so we felt strongly that we would need to brand ourselves early on to build a user base. Again we had a couple of reasons to support our decision that a blog would be the best method to go about doing this:

* We needed a way to reach out to this demographic outside of our internal print publicity and/or library web site. While plenty of people in their twenties and thirties do use the library, we really wanted to reach out to those who, for whatever reason, were not regular library patrons.

* Through our talks we also realized that we really wanted to reach out to those who might not ever be able to attend a discussion. And because we are all such heavy blog users ourselves, we knew that a blog would provide us with the best mechanism for delivering information to these people.

So we approached our IT department and our web master with our thoughts and they were very willing to work with us to make the genre X blog happen. Collectively we spent close to a month looking at different blog publishing applications and making decisions on how we wanted it to look. Since it was launched we’ve met with our web master a number of times to discuss tweaking it to make it more user friendly.

Since the blog’s inception we’ve had over 15,000 unique visitors and we’ve seen a steady increase in its usage every month. Our stats this year alone have quadrupled since January and it is by and large the most popular method of informing new members about the group. Because of its apparent popularity we have recently set goals for the number of times we need to post each week. So hopefully you will begin seeing new content on a more frequent basis!

It is important for librarians to take pride in the fact that we do good work, and to share it with others.  This is one of the reasons blogging is so important to our profession.  Creating good library programming for your local community is your job as a librarian, but when something works or doesn’t work the blogosphere makes it really easy to share that so that others can benefit from your experience. 

‘Along with British chef Heston Blumenthal, Adrià is often associated with “molecular gastronomy,” although the Catalan chef does not consider his cuisine to be of this category. Instead, he has referred to his cooking as deconstructivist. Adrià’s stated goal is to “provide unexpected contrasts of flavour, temperature and texture. Nothing is what it seems. The idea is to provoke, surprise and delight the diner.”’

Pretty remarkable stuff, but hey, you aren’t reading a cooking blog. This is a library blog, and I do actually have a point.

Rebecca Federman is the librarian and curator of the menu and cookbook collection at NYPL, and before this blockbuster program began, she had an opportunity to stand up in front of this group of critics, chefs, hobbyists and foodies of all sorts and advocate for her library collection. She made it clear to the group in attendance that the menu and cookbook collection is a “living entity” and not just an archive; that they actively collect and make these resources available to the public. She smiled and projected her enthusiasm and interest in the old menus, and on a screen showed images of some of the extrasupercool items in the stacks upstairs. I’m pretty sure that I was one of very few librarians in the audience that night (correct me if I am wrong, librarians!), so I must say I was pleased to hear Federman so excited about her collections and so just “getting it”. She understood and explained to everyone in the room the crucial link between the panel discussion they were about to see and the books and media that the library preserves and ensures access to.

I left the Celeste Bartos forum that evening feeling like Rebecca Federman had been given me some kind of challenge, a challenge not just for me but one that I ought to share with the readers of the PLA blog. The New York Public Library is a remarkable and unique institution; the special collections there draw unique audiences from across the globe. In some ways this specialization makes it easier to advocate for the collections, or at least it makes it immediately visible that a specific audience needs to be engaged in some kind of dialogue with their library. How then are public librarians with our not-so-special “core” collections of fiction and non-fiction, children’s materials, manga, or DVDs supposed to exercise this same kind of promotion and awareness of the library collection? It is really not that easy, but we have an obligation to the public we serve to let them know what we have to offer.

The moral of the story is that at least in my mind, the ideal library program always has some kind of tie-in to the media we collect and distribute. That is not to say that there aren’t plenty of wonderful programs out there at public libraries across the country that stand on their own as educational, recreational, and inspiring. There are. But programming exposes, advertises, and merchandises library media and that is an opportunity we need to take advantage of as frequently as possible.

In the spirit of the interactivity and collaboration that I believe makes blogging so important, I invite readers to post their success stories of moments when they got to expose library collections because of a public program.

The webinar’s speaker, Nina Hess, is a Senior Editor at Mirrorstone, an imprint of the very famous and popular gaming company, Wizards of the Coast (publishers of Dungeons & Dragons, Magic: The Gathering, and much more). She edits fantasy fiction for children and teens. She is also the author of A Practical Guide to Monsters, which follows the company’s New York Times bestseller, A Practical Guide to Dragons. Needless to say, she is quite the expert.

I was invited to attend a preview of the webinar, and it’s an excellent Fantasy 101 crash course. Nina talks about:

• her experiences working at Mirrorstone (where she works in a “fantasy world”),
• why fantasy is so popular with kids, especially boys, and keeps them reading,
• the different flavors of fantasy plus a little on fantasy vs. science fiction,
• how fantasy and gaming can go hand-in-hand, and how tabletop role-play can lead to more kids in the library *and* more reading,
• program ideas that incorporate fantasy and fantasy reading

This webinar is a great place to start if you’re lost in fantasy, or just need a push in the right direction. Nina also talks about the many resources offered by her company (many of them free!) to help your library begin its journey into fantasy.

The program is coming up soon, so now is the time to register!

Event details:
A Practical Guide to Fantasy
Friday, September 28, 2007
11 a.m. – 12 p.m. Eastern Time [10 a.m. CT / 9 a.m. MT / 8 a.m. PT]
To Register: Send your name and contact information to . You may either email or call in your credit card information at 914-241-2117.
Cost: $50 per person
Group discounts:
10-49: $45/person
50-99: $40/person
100+: $35/person

What you’ll need: This is a Web-based seminar. Registered participants will receive participation instructions, log-on information and a toll-free number to dial in by telephone for the audio portion of the seminar upon payment of the registration fee.

Public libraries were right there with the fans to celebrate the 7th canon. The Allen County Public Library coordinated a huge evening chock full of activities and music at their new library on Library Plaza, which you can read about care of the Fort Wayne News-Sentinal online (they also have a listing on their home page in the scrolling news graphics for a house elf clothing drive, which is very clever). Thanks to All Things Web 2.0 for the tip via your post! You can also peruse their entire photo set devoted to the party on Flickr.

By the looks of several Flickr photostreams, there were lots of libraries that had a really good time Friday night:

• Olds Municipal Library (Canada): Dumbledore, book reading, trivia, and more
• Kettleston Memorial Library (Alaska): potion mixing, quiz by Professor Trelawney, prophecy reading, and more
• Rancho Cucamonga Public Library (California): the “storm,” house elves, Hagrid, and more

You can also see library events on YouTube. Wellesley Free Library (Massachusetts) had quite the celebration, and you can see it all edited up quite nicely into 4m30s by video blogger Wellesley Townsman (a.k.a. Brad Reed). In a play on the epilogue of the book, you can watch Harry’s future as a library employee at the Hays Public Library (Kansas) battling the evils of vending machine vandalism and book theft.

I leave you with a video of the magical 2 minutes at the Land O’ Lakes branch of the Pasco County Libraries (Florida), when they opened the box at midnight:

Did your library have an event on Friday night? Post links to your photos, videos, articles, and more in the comments on this post! And, don’t forget a link to your library’s web site.

•Gender gap
-Between 1980-2004, gender gap of leisure-time reading
-1 in 10 boys now reads for fun
-Gender gap has become a chasm (“…a marker of gender identity: girls read, boys don’t.” –Bauerlein & Stotsky 2005, Bauerlein 2007)

•Sex differences in brain development (Harriet Hanlon, et al. 1999)
-studied 224 girls, 284 boys, ages 2 months to 16 years
-fine motor skills and language : girls develop faster
-gross motor skills, spatial memory, visual targeting : boys develop faster

•Learning styles
-Boys listen better when they are standing (rather than sitting – “their brains shut off”)
-Most young girls learn better when sitting
-Does not mean there is a difference in rank (or abilities)
-Boys are taught to sit still in school like the girls (so then school = girly … why they hate it)
-Best temperature to learn: 60 degrees boys, 75 degrees girls (children and young adults for normal size) – 6 degrees of separation

•Extraneous noise (Colin, Elliot and assoc.)
-Bother girls and women at sound levels 10 to 40x lower than boys/,men
-Girls are aware of what’s going on around them
-90-92% of boys not bothered by noise

•Storytime
-Offer Noisy Time Story Time (and Quiet Time Story Time)
-Noisy:
-Turn the thermostat down
-Seats are optional (bean bag chairs?) – boys love to crouch
-Rule: No hitting, can’t disturb others
-Choose stories boys enjoy (Watch out for “demand characteristics” – what’s the right choice?)
-Allow buzzing/tapping/clicking

For more information, visit Dr. Sax’s website: www.boysadrift.com (same title as his new book, being published in August 2007)

I had read an article about this program from the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities in my Literacy for Special Population course last Fall at Simmons College, so I was curious to hear more and decided to attend this Sunday morning program.

Prime Time is a family literacy program comprised of 6 to 8 week sessions with reading, discussion and storytelling at public libraries and other locations. Each session involves the reading of a few books by a professional storyteller, followed by a discussion led by a “scholar” (usually a university professor). Librarians have the opportunity to market library resources to the program participants during each session. The books are selected for their multicultural representations and the opportunities they offer for discussions of humanities topics.

The program was started in Louisiana in 1991, but has since spread across many other states thanks to grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and support from ALA. Librarians who plan to implement Prime Time at their library participate in an intense training session in New Orleans several times a year.

During the conference session, we heard stories from a number of librarians who have planned Prime Time at their libraries. Sue Warner from Kalamzoo City Public Library and other librarians from across the U.S. shared their experiences, the ways they made the program work for their community, and their passion for this wonderful program. They all emphasized that this program requires a great deal of planning and is not cheap, but that the rewards are immeasurable.

Prime Time has applied for more funding for 2008 and hopes to support more libraries in the upcoming year both through training and through funding the first series of programming. Check out the ALA site in late August/early September for more information about available grants for Prime Time. For more information about the program see their web site: http://www.leh.org/html/primetime.html

A few highlights:
•Take an “old” idea and put a new spin on it, such as…
oBasic computer training (introduction to internet)
oHow to buy tickets online
oHow to email kids and grandkids (and set up an email account)
oTrain seniors in new technology (blogs, etc.)
oHow to use digital photography
oGaming – Wii festival and tournaments
oSocial networking (Seniornet or Eons) (http://www.seniornet.org / http://www.eons.com/)

•Other ideas:
oFilm and book discussions
oMovement: basic exercise, dance
o2nd careers, resumes for 70+ group
oFinancial security, recently retired
oFilm program, e.g. A Miss Marple film theme
oConsumer health
oLocal history
oGenealogy- create a genealogy club, teach online resources
oNostalgia programming
oOld basics: creating writing (could also use with blogs), poetry (open house program @ library)
oBiggest draw: music!
oGrandparents raising grandkids
oPrograms on coping with loss
oOther ideas: http://www.libraryolderadults.blogspot.com/

•Programs should be:
oEngaging, interactive
oAllow people to share, discuss, reminisce (they like what’s familiar)
oGet people involved, use their mental capabilities (helps keep them young)
oServe refreshments (this works with people of all ages!)

•Programming needs a gender balance (not just for women)

•Marketing
otraditional (print, papers)
oreceipt printers
oflyers, calendars, newsletters in library
ochurch bulletins
othis is the last generation that is print-oriented