Grow Your Own @ your library grants
PLA is now accepting applications for its popular ?Grow Your Own @ your library? institutional scholarship. This year, PLA will award nine public libraries with grants of $8,000 each to be distributed to staff members who are working to obtain a master?s degree in library and information science. One library from each of the nine Public Library Data Service (PLDS) population categories will be selected....

Great CE delivered right to your desktop!  Registration for YALSA's fall session of e-courses opened Aug. 21st.  The session will run from Oct. 2-30.  The courses are meant to be the equivalent of a full day workshop.  The cost is $135 for YALSA members, $175 for ALA members, and $195 for non members.  To register go to www.ala.org/yalsa.  Three courses will be offered:

Outreach has always been important to libraries, and now it is proving to be one of the only sure fire ways of reaching underserved audiences.   The content of this course will focus on the importance of providing outreach services; different ways libraries can provide outreach services to teenagers with minimal impact on staff and budget; and  how to garner support for outreach efforts.  Instructor: Angela Pfeil

Adolescent Development and Library Behavior  Teen brain development rivals that of the toddler years: maybe that explains the attitude and characteristics of this historically underserved age group. Find out exactly why teens act the way they do and learn how librarians can address patron behavior issues in a way that will develop relationships with young adults. By the end of this class, participants will: 1) Understand the physical development of the adolescent brain and how it manifests into physical and emotional behaviors, 2) Examine the developmental needs and assets of adolescents, and the role libraries must play in helping teens grow into healthy adults, 3) Discuss how to apply newly acquired knowledge and techniques to improve library services to teens in ways that meet developmental needs and build developmental assets.  Instructor: Beth Gallaway

How does teen use of technology to play, learn, and create improve their text-based literacy skills? How are teens using technology to communicate, collaborate, and create?  What technologies should librarians know about to support teen interest in building community online? In this four week course you will find the answers to these questions, become familiar with the tools and techniques teens use to communicate and collaborate online, and discover how to inform your own community about best practices that support teen's technology-based print literacies.  Participants in the series will have the opportunity to talk with others about teen use of technology and how that use improves literacy skills. They will also have the chance to create a framework for a program or service at their library that supports teen technology-based print literacy.   Instructor: Linda Braun

PLA announces new start dates for e-learning courses
?E-Learning @ PLA,? the online education program of the Public Library Association, will offer five new start dates for two of its popular courses. ?New Planning for Results? and ?Creating Policies for Results? will each be offered five times between September 2006 and April 2007....

The State Library is now taking registrations for Public Library Management 1 and 2 classes in the CE Catalog

(http://www.statelibraryofiowa.org/cgi-bin/cecat/).  PLM 1 will begin on Tuesday, September 12 and PLM 2 will begin on Wednesday, September 6.  The registration deadline for both classes is Monday, August 14.

OPAL: Online Programming for All Libraries--And All Library Users

NEW: Streaming Audio Preview of OPAL online events coming in July (playback time: 6 minutes) NEW: Streaming Video Introduction to OPAL (Windows Media Video file; playback time 2 minutes, 39 seconds)

OPAL is an international collaborative effort by libraries of all types to provide web-based programs and training for library users and library staff members.
These live events are held in online rooms where participants can interact via voice-over-IP, text chatting, and synchronized browsing.
Everyone is welcome to participate in OPAL programs. Usually there is no need to register. Nearly all OPAL programs are offered free of charge to participants.
Examples of OPAL public online programs include book discussion programs, interviews, special events, library training, memoir writing workshops, and virtual tours of special digital library collections.
FROM: http://www.opal-online.org/


We are planning a DEMCO Book Repair Workshop for sometime this fall, Ken will still do a  workshop at county association meetings if requested and scheduled anead of time.

The books Google could open
Book Search is a Herculean undertaking, digitizing both new and old works housed in some of the world?s top libraries and rendering them searchable through Google?s website. This powerful tool will make less well-known written works or hard-to-find research materials more accessible to students, teachers, and others around the world. Book Search comes at a time when college and university libraries are hard-pressed to keep up with the publishing and technology revolutions....
Washington Post, Aug. 22

Smithsonian photography archive online
The Smithsonian Photography Initiative has launched an electronic portal to a portion of the vast image collections residing in its 18 museums and galleries, nine research centers, and the National Zoo. Its search engine offers access to a cross-section of the work of more than 100 photographers, who used 50 different photographic and image-making processes and technologies....
Smithsonian Institution

University of California launches Calisphere website
The University of California launched on August 21 a free website that offers educators, students, and the public access to more than 150,000 images, documents, and other primary source materials from the libraries and museums of the UC campuses and cultural heritage organizations across California. Calisphere?s primary sources include photographs, documents, newspapers, political cartoons, and other cultural artifacts that reveal the diverse history and culture of the state....
University of California, Aug. 21

NCES: School librarians are now instructors
The National Center for Education Statistics has released a report on expenditures for public elementary and secondary education for the 2003?2004 school year, which now includes librarians in the category of instruction and instruction-related expenditures. It is unclear what changes, if any, the Texas Education Agency (or other state agencies) will make to the 65% rule in light of this recent change to the NCES definition....
Texas Association of School Administrators, Aug. 17

Chapel Hill SILS celebrates its 75th year
The School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is launching its 75th anniversary September 18 with a celebration on the theme, ?Illuminating the Past, Imagining the Future.? Photos showing the school?s history appear on its website....
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill SILS

Search privacy: The danger is real
It actually isn?t that hard to identify someone just by their search information, writes Jim Rapoza. Several national news outlets have been able to successfully identify individuals based solely on groupings of search terms. One of the main reasons this works is that people like to search for information on themselves or on people they know, not realizing that these ?ego searches? are often clear markers for their entire search history....
eWeek, Aug. 21

How to find free, quality, full-text articles and books on the scholarly web
Robert J. Lackie, instruction and reference librarian at Rider University in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, describes pertinent resources on the free web of interest to librarians and other educators who conduct research and would like to easily supplement their currently available holdings, in print and electronic formats and via commercial vendors? fee-based subscription databases, within their own libraries....
MultiMedia & Internet @ Schools, July/Aug.

Award-winning Australian children?s books
The Children?s Book Council of Australia has announced its picks of the best literature for young readers published in 2005, with J. C. Burke?s The Story of Tom Brennan (Random House Australia) chosen as best book for older readers. The judges commented in their report (PDF file): ?This year?s reading saw families wrestling with mental illnesses such as bipolar disorder, depression, and schizophrenia. In several notable works, authors were able to provide shimmers of credible optimism as a counterpoint to despair in the face of unremitting bleakness.?...
Children?s Book Council of Australia

Youths are underwhelmed by it all
A Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll finds that a large majority of the 12- to 24-year-olds surveyed are bored with their entertainment choices some or most of the time. Other polls in the series show that this demographic likes to watch brand-new movies at home rather than in theaters, says that duplicating CDs or DVDs it owns is perfectly legal, isn?t as eager to watch TV on cellphones and iPods as networks might think, uses the phone to text-message friends more than call them, and often plays games or sends e-mail at the same time as homework....
Los Angeles Times, Aug. 7?11

23 things you can learn about Web 2.0
Learn along with the staff of the Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, as they participate in a nine-week program to complete 23 small exercises to explore and expand their knowledge of the internet and Web 2.0 technologies. (Sorry, only PLCMC staffers are eligible for the prizes.) Details about the tasks are activated each week, and the project is in its third week now....
Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County

Rejected paper proposal blues
Steven Bell has some suggestions to offer those whose papers were not accepted for the ACRL 13th National Conference in Baltimore, March 31?April 1, 2007?or for any conference, for that matter....
ACRLog, Aug. 23

What does your browser reveal about you?
?Believe it or not, the choice of your favorite browser reveals a lot about your personality,? sardonically writes Michigan State grad student Luke Maciak, who says of IE 5.0 users: ?You stubbornly refuse to upgrade that ancient Win 98 box that you are using because you don?t need some fancy computer and in your opinion the one you have works just fine. You also probably don?t use antivirus or antispyware either.? He provides stats on the browsers used by visitors to his site....
Terminally Incoherent, Aug. 19