(Reporting from the Internet Cafe)

Libraries have come a long way in how they provide downloadable materials to their patrons.  So many people are getting e-readers (for themselves or as gifts), and they expect their libraries to have titles for them to download.  Here are some suggestions to try to meet these demands:

• Libraries should be continually adding popular titles to their collections
• Watch “on hold” lists closely to see if more copies should be added
• See if your library can increase its budget for downloadables

Remember to make this collection simple for patrons to find and access on your website and catalog.  Also consider customer service training for some of your staff, and don’t forget to market your downloadable collection the the public!

During this spring’s PLA conference in Portland, Oregon, Gretchen Kolderup observed that the stream of tweets tagged with #pla10 could be likened to “a roomful of people talking at and not with each other.” The stream for this year’s Annual followed a similar trend. Whenever I scanned the most recent tweets, I didn’t catch many back-and-forth exchanges using either hashtag. Messages tended to be brief bursts of ideas and resources gained from sessions rather than ongoing discussions. A year’s worth of following various conference activities through Twitter has given me the sense that this is often the case with on-the-go conference updates, but I don’t mind the fragmentation. Even if conference tweets don’t spark an in-the-moment conversation through @-replies or the site’s direct message feature, they can foster connection among Twitter users at a later time. Aside from harvesting links to conference notes or video footage, one of my favorite ways to make use of the stream is simply to see who is using it. Conference hashtags are a great resource for finding fellow librarians, technology buffs, and booklovers to chat with long after conference events have wrapped up.

There are some elements of the ALA Annual experience the Twitter stream can’t replicate, of course. That wicked case of conference shoulder from lugging bags around? Can’t say I missed that! Face-to-face interaction with people who care about library services as much as I do? I wish I could have had that opportunity this summer, and hope to see you all in New Orleans next year. Many, many thanks to everyone who indulged those of us at home with updates from this year’s physical and virtual conferences!

Emerging Leaders get support in completing a ALA chapter sponsored project, and learn about leadership in those chapters. We first met at Midwinter, and then worked online on our projects. Friday’s session was our chance to present our findings to ALA attendees, and we were all busy talking up our projects. You can read all the project summaries on ALA Connect here: http://connect.ala.org/node/10546

I was part of Project P, sponsored by LITA. We evaluated different tools the LITA membership used to communicate with members; most use ALA Connect for official business, with mailing lists coming in a close second. We also developed a few guidelines for how to best use ALA Connect. Do you use ALA Connect? Our group did use it for completing our project, but we ended up using Google Docs for our final project report…What uses are most effective? Any tips for new users?

“Superbooks:  How Graphics Can Save Your Library” wasn’t a colorful, image-filled presentation on the history of graphics, or a sneak peek at new titles.  Instead, it was a numbers-based case for graphic novels as a solid investment.  Using statistics, graphs, and his own “cost/circ ratio,” Zabriskie demonstrated that the graphic novels in his library’s young adult collection at the Central Library in Jamaica, Queens cost about thirty-eight cents per circulation.

The “cost/circ ratio” is simply the cost of a book divided by the numbers of times it has circulated.   In the Central Library’s young adult collection, graphics had better value for their dollar investment than even high-interest titles such as the Twilight and Harry Potter series.

However, this formula is not meant to be used as a weeding tool.  “Instead of weeding, do some seeding,” Zabriskie suggests.  The high circulation numbers of graphic novels can allow libraries to keep less popular materials without sacrificing circulation statistics.  The classics, for example, may never be circulation blockbusters, but they should be available when patrons need them:  they are “part of our identification as libraries,” notes Zabriskie.

Zabriskie would like to use larger data sets in order to test  his findings’ statistical relevance.  If you would like to contribute similar statistical information from your library, contact him at .

And, of course, you can also use the numbers you generate as a convincing case for the presence of graphic novels in your collection.

– Lisa Goldstein

And, if you discover any “great” new titles at the conference, feel free to nominate them here.

First Second, the graphic novel publisher, hosted a dinner for my committee and other graphic novel fans on Thursday.  Gene Yang, author of Printz winner American Born Chinese, was a special guest.  He told us about a new project of his titled Level Up, a graphic novel about a gamer who receives a divine calling to go to medical school.  Yang told us that he was inspired by his brother, a doctor who is also a video game fan.  When his brother decided to become a gastroenterologist, Yang wondered why anyone would want to become a “poop doctor.”  His brother, though, raved about the wonders of performing colonoscopies, which were like playing “a video game up your ass.” Dessert was served shortly after.

Hungry for more? Visit the Graphic Novel Pavilion on the Exhibits Floor.

– Lisa Goldstein

More than half of American adults (90 million people) are considered to have low health literacy. Combined with the facts that medical information isn’t written for a lay person, that we’re being increasingly tasked with monitoring our own health and often those of our loved ones, and availability of prescription drugs has increased, navigating consumer health information can be overwhelming. Particularly for those who aren’t native English speakers, accessing, evaluating, and understanding health information can be a challenge. Also, health information is filled with jargon, and patients are often intimidated by doctors, which is often similar to customers’ experience with libraries: as such, librarians should follow these tips when answering health questions:

1. Be approachable – be alert, stand, greet patrons.
2. Listen – Allow patrons to fully state their needs; ask “What do you need?”
3. Searching – Show materials as you find it. “Do you have time now? If not, let’s schedule an appointment.” Set them at ease: “This is new for me, too. Let’s learn this new topic together.”
4. Follow up – Check in with the patron. “Was this enough information?”

Most importantly, stress that you’re there to help.

Also, for any health question, she suggests starting with Medline Plus (http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/).

She’ll also make her slides available online, so I’ll post the link when she sends it to me.

What worked
Twitter turned out to be great for getting snippets of sessions I didn’t attend. It was sometimes hard to decide which of two or three concurrent talks I wanted to go to, so it was nice afterward to be able to scroll back through recent tweets to see if anything particularly interesting (and necessarily pithy) had come out of the ones I missed. It was interesting, too, to see how many people quoted the same thought, and it was especially interesting to see what sessions Twitter users attended. There were, as you’d expect, a lot of tweets about the technology sessions, and there were a fair amount from the youth services sessions, but there were very few from the management track sessions. Make of that what you will.

What didn’t work as well
Unfortunately, the #pla10-tagged tweets seemed to mostly be people putting out ideas without much dialog happening around those ideas. That is, Twitter looked like a room full of people talking at and not with each other. I did see some short exchanges, and it’s possible that these follow-up conversations and elaborations happened in @-replies that didn’t get tagged (I know I had a few of those myself), but it didn’t seem like Twitter was being used much to build ideas or community.

My other main disappointment was that plans to have a tweet-up (an in-person meeting of Twitter users) weren’t well published and mostly fell through: one person said that only five people said they’d be there and then only two actually showed up–but I didn’t even hear about it until it was over. This missed opportunity to build community was especially sad since national conventions are such a great time to meet people you normally wouldn’t, or to finally meet people you’ve “known” online.

I’m really glad that I was twittering publicly at PLA, though. I’ve been using Twitter for almost two years now, but with a locked account and just among friends; it’s only in the last few months that I’ve created a public account and started socializing outside of my immediate circle. It added a depth and dimension and feeling of connection, both to content and to people, that I didn’t have at ALA. And from the experience I’ve gained more followers and started following some new people I wouldn’t have found without Twitter and hashtags and the conference. The complexity of what we say is somewhat limited by Twitter’s 140-characters-or-less format, but I’m looking forward to seeing more ideas and thoughts from new library friends in the coming months.

- Gretchen Kolderup
www.librarified.net

I also answered a lot of questions and it just struck me as funny that I was playing reference librarian to a convention of librarians. Just like at the reference desk, most of the questions I fielded were directional and ready reference inquiries: the ALA Store is right over there under the giant hanging sign that says “ALA Bookstore.” Yes, I can look up where that publisher is and yes you can use the conference program to decide what session you’re going to and yes you may look at this map and yes you may take anything on this table and yes I know where the first aid station is and yes I’d be happy to pass along to the higher-ups that you’re loving this conference. Even we the information professionals need a little help sometimes!

My first conference was ALA Annual last year and I found the exhibit hall there with its roving throngs of librarians, massive vendor displays, and general warehouse proportions kind of overwhelming. The exhibit hall at PLA was a lot more manageable. I also really enjoyed being able to help and connect with librarians who visited the PLA booth–I’d highly recommend volunteering for that at the next conference you attend.

- Gretchen Kolderup
www.librarified.net

In some ways, the needs of pregnant and parenting teens are similar to a lot of public library patrons’ needs: they want help with their education, with finding a job, and with entertainment. But they also have more specific needs like learning parenting skills, being put in touch with other community organizations that can help them, and just having someone in their lives that they can trust. We can meet these needs with our usual materials and services that provide for the educational, informational, entertainment, and lifelong learning needs of all of our patrons, but we can also provide a friendly staff, contact names and addresses for community organizations, and storytimes that also teach parenting and reading skills–especially by using the Every Child Ready to Read framework.

With the principles of ECRR in mind, Maryann designed a four-session program that emphasizes the six aspects (print motivation, vocabulary, phonological awareness, print awareness, letter knowledge, and narrative skills) and also explains the general benefits of reading to your baby.

The first meeting is an introduction to ECRR and provides statistics about the benefits of reading to your baby. The second meeting focuses on children’s books, choosing books for your baby, and print motivation. The third meeting covers phonological awareness and vocabulary. The final meeting reviews the first three and touches on teen parents’ reading memories and provides encouragement for the future. Each session combines storytelling and songs and rhymes and fingerplays with parenting skills that include aspects of child development.

Maryann also spent a lot of time talking about partnering with other organizations in the community. Such a partnership might be something as simple as creating a bookmark with information about the classes and good books for babies in the stuff that gets sent home with moms when they leave the hospital, but it can be as much as going to shelters and group homes and correctional facilities to do the classes. There are so many other organizations you can partner with to make these programs a success including high schools, the local WIC agency, the crisis pregnancy center, churches, the department of health, even the grocery store (advertise in the formula aisle!).

Serving pregnant or parenting teens also exists at an interesting intersection of teen services and children’s services, so it can be an interesting collaboration between librarians or departments.

There are some barriers to library access that some of these teen patrons may have. They may be balancing school and work. They may be living in temporary housing. They may be totally dependent on welfare. They may not be strong readers. They may lack transportation. They may not know what good parenting looks like. They might not even be able to get a library card without a parent’s signature since they’re underage–and what if they’ve been kicked out? Does your library have a policy that would provide for them?

Despite these stumbling blocks, this is an important demographic to reach because as they see what’s available to them and their babies at the library, they’ll come back. And Maryann’s program works: she’s not only seen these teens come back for more library services, but they’re also more likely to graduate and more likely to start reading more themselves, and their children develop better reading and language skills through the program.

What does your library have now for pregnant or parenting teens? What more can we be doing to serve them?

- Gretchen Kolderup
www.librarified.net

I’m going to be totally honest here: the half-hour meeting I had with Miguel Figueroa, the director of ALA’s Office for Diversity and Spectrum, was hands-down the best resume review I’ve ever had. He was very detailed in his advice, explained the rationale behind his suggestions, and was attentive to my concerns and the thought process behind what I’d originally written. He didn’t just give me generic resume advice or assess how well my resume matched an accepted format; he read every word on my resume and told me what I could do to strengthen every single section. He also did a really good job of helping me identify my strengths and what the most impressive parts of each of my jobs and skill areas were and how to best communicate that.

I’m going to have to set aside a large chunk of time when I get home to completely overhaul the design and content of my resume, but I feel a lot more confident about being able to put my best foot forward. It’s just a shame that there aren’t more opportunities like this available here, and that the resume review clinic was only for a few hours on one day. It’s a great service and I’m really glad I was able to take advantage of it.

- Gretchen Kolderup
www.librarified.net