Friday Notes

Friday Notes for 08/31/2007

While standing around disturbing Kathy at the West Union library (during a lull in the Google Tools class) I spotted Julie from the Wellsburg library collecting ideas.  What an excellent idea.  At many of the county meetings we share what we did or what’s new but seldom do we talk about the on going mundane stuff.

So a SUGGESTION for county meetings:  As you leave your library for a library meeting pick up a copy of each thing on your counter/display rack of which you have multiple copies and bring it along to share with others.

ANNOUNCEMENTS: Aug 31 - Enrich Iowa Letter of Agreement to SLI

To send items to Arlington Public Library on AEA - 1 send them through Starmont High School and NOT the elementary school.

The Open Access Annual Report form lists participating libraries.  If you'd like to see which libraries are participating for FY08 (July 1, 2007 through June 30, 2008), see http://www.statelibraryofiowa.org/ld/enrich-ia/open-access

Please save the dates of:

October 10-12 for the Iowa Library Association Annual Conference!

September 26 for NEILSA Town Meeting

From: Jan Peterson <dunkpublib@dunkerton.net>
To: "davenport@www.neilsa.org" <davenport@www.neilsa.org>
Subject: Check out this community project
I thought you'd be interested in this request at myhometownhelper.com to help fund a community project.

Sponsored by Hamburger Helper®, MyHometownHelper.com is giving away up to $100,000 to help fund projects in hometowns all across America. You can show your support by simply adding your comments to this request.

CHILDREN’S SUMMER LIBRARY WORKSHOPS:
Feb 6 - Grundy Center Community Center
Feb 7 - Johnston Public Library (2 workshops - morning and afternoon)
Feb 12 - North Liberty Community Center
Feb 13 - Fairfield Inn - Fairfield
Feb 14 - YMCA - Red Oak
Feb 15 - Swan Lake Nature Center - Carroll
Feb 26 - Iowa State Bank - Orange City
Feb 27 - Park View Inn - West Bend
Feb 28 - Mason City Public Library
Feb 29 - Upper Iowa University - Fayette

TEEN SUMMER LIBRARY WORKSHOPS:
March 11 - North Liberty Community Center
March 12 - Johnston Public Library
March 13 - Kings Pointe Resort – Storm Lake
----
Karen M. Day, Administrative Assistant
North Central Library Service Area

LSA's

AEA Resources and the Public Library
Description: Students often come to the public library to complete research projects assigned at school and ask for help. This training will introduce public librarians to the resources available to students from the Area Education Agencies. Resources will include EBSCO, World Book, AP MultiMedia, ClipArt, Unitedstreaming, Atomic Learning, and SIRS. The Keystone AEA #1 online catalog will also be introduced. Participants are welcome to bring their own laptop with wireless Internet connection or a limited number of laptops will be provided.
Location: Keystone Area Education Agency #1, 1400 2nd St. NW, Elkader, rooms D4 & 5.
Two identical sessions will be offered with a limit of 20 participants in each: Thursday, October 4: #1: 9 a.m.--noon, registration number 41001 #2: 1 p.m.--4 p.m., registration number 41002
To register, call 800-632-5918 and ask for the registration desk.

Libraries with cake pans in NE. If you are not on this list PLEASE contact Ken at NEILSA

Arlington Public Library
Conrad Public Library
Denver Public Library
Elkader Public Library
Fayette Community Library
Garnavillo Public Library
Hudson Public Library
Maynard Community Library
New Hampton Public Library
Reinbeck Public Library
Sumner Public Library
Tripoli Public Library

FROM the Eye Opener: Social Networking & Schools Studied: Northwest libraries have been hearing a lot about “the social web” lately, most notably from NWILS workshop “Flickr, Wikis, and Blogs—Oh My.” That workshop premiered in May and has since been repeated in some county settings around the region. Just last week, the National School Board Association (NSBA) released a study entitled “Creating & Connecting: Research and Guidelines Regarding Online Social and Educational Networking.” The study was conducted by Grunwald Associates and underwritten by News Corp, Verizon, and Microsoft.

The study defined social networking as “…a cluster of technical functions that allow users to easily create, share, and respond to information…” Overall, the study provides real support for many points made by ALA regarding the importance of student access to the social web. Some valuable findings include:

60% of students report using social networking for education-related topics
Negative experiences online are much lower than expected
Parents are, in fact, much more involved in their kids’ use of technology than is commonly perceived
Classroom use of technology is increasing, but school technology leaders are still skeptical of social networking applications
The majority of school districts are using some kind of social networking software to communicate with students, parents, and the community
Social networking does allow students to engage in creative expressions of all kinds

The report also includes in-depth statistics and a list of recommendations for educators….find it here http://www.nsba.org

Blogs, PODS & Newsletters on-line:

NEILSA e-rate Consortia  Blog at:  http://www.neilsa.org/weblogs/consortia.php

SEILSA Blog up at: http://southeasternlsa.blogspot.com/

SWILSA Blog is up at: http://swilsanews.blogspot.com

Footnotes is now online. http://www.statelibraryofiowa.org/news/footnotes

The latest edition of Footnotes is now online at
http://www.statelibraryofiowa.org.  Look under "News Items"
This issue includes articles on the new "Iowa Author List," RAGBRAI libraries, WebJunction's many treasurers and news from around the state, to name a few. 
Thank you for taking the time to read!
All links in the newsletter are live.

Annette Wetteland Communications Coordinator

CLASSES:

UPCOMING CLASSES: TechAtlas, Google Extras, Technology Toys, Gameing in the Library, Using WebJunction

Consortia e-rate 2008 see NEILSA e-rate Consortia  Blog at:  http://www.neilsa.org/weblogs/consortia.php post on Wednesday Oct. 3

Non-Consortia Workshops e-rate workshops in CILSA and SELSA
November 6th [CILSA] 9:30 am - 12:30 pm Des Moines/State Library
November 20th [SELSA] 1:00 pm - 4:00 pm Burlington
November 28th [SELSA] 2:00 pm -- 5:00 pm Oskaloosa

IF you ask we will run one in NEILSA

Train Employees and Officials to Be Ready for Privacy Challenges Class this fall co-sponsored by NEILSA & Waterloo Public Library

Town Meeting: Extreme Makeover @ Your Library: You Can Do It!
Annual town meetings provide opportunities to learn about major issues affecting libraries, gain ideas for improving programs and services and get to know State Library and Library Service Area staff better. Registration is now available in the CE catalog,

CE CATALOGS:

1. http://neilsa.org/con-ed.html NEILSA
2. http://www.statelibraryofiowa.org/ld/continuing-ed Statewide ce Catalog
3. http://www.slis.wisc.edu/continueed Wisc. School of Library & Information Science
4. http://www.ala.org/cetemplate.cfm?section=ceclearinghouse&template=/cfapps/contedu/searchmain.cfm ALA
5. http://www.opal-online.org OPAL
6. http://ia.webjunction.org/do/Navigation?category=442 WebJunction

DUE DATES:

• Aug 31 - Enrich Iowa Letter of Agreement to SLI
• September 20 Clermont 6:00 Fayette County Library Association NOTE change from 19 to 20
• September 25 - 28 Town Meetings, NEILSA is: Wednesday, September 26, 2007 - Waterloo Arts and Rec Center
• Sept. 26–28: Association for Rural and Small Libraries, Annual Conference, Columbus, Ohio. Contact: ARSL, 814-393-2014.
• October 2 Allison at ______ pm Butler County Library Association
• October 2 Lime Springs at 7:00 Howard County Meeting w/CE
  
• Oct. 15 @ 7 p.m. in Lamont. 7:00 Buchanan County Library Association
• Oct 16 Lamont 7:00 Buchanan County Library Association
• Oct 16th at 7:00 p.m. in Monona Clayton County Library Association
• October 18 Decorah at 7:00 pm Winnesheck County Library Association
• October 22, 2007 at 9:00A.M. at Dike Grundy County Association Meeting
• October 30 - Public Library Survey Due at SLI
• December 6 Library 101

The State Library Calendar http://www.silo.lib.ia.us

STUFF:

Help Us to Improve TechAtlas
With the help of consultants (and technology planning gurus- they literally wrote the book) Sandra Nelson and Diane Mayo, we are assessing ways in which WebJunction and TechAtlas can provide tools that would make technology planning easier for libraries. As a part of this study, we are soliciting input from libraries on why they do or don’t have technology plans, why they do or don’t apply for E-rate funds, and what tools might make the whole process easier. Please take a few minutes to complete a brief survey about your library’s technology planning environment. The survey should only take about 10 minutes to complete, please click here to access the survey.

Thank you! Kendra Morgan, TechAtlas Outreach Specialist, WebJunction, (206) 288-5805.

Here are some citations I found that might be of interest:
1.  Most Requested Out of Print Books BookFinder.com has released the 2007 edition of the BookFinder.com Report which tracks the most sought-after out-of-print books in America, breaking down demand for popular OOP titles in ten different genres. For full listing, go to:  http://report.bookfinder.com/2007/
2.  Top 100 Undiscovered Web Sites by PC magazine.  From August 27th -- "Some of these sites are completely under the radar and get very little traffic. Others are hugely popular within a specific demographic. But all of them deserve to be in your bookmarks. " www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,2174685,00.asp

--------------------------------- Beth Marie Quanbeck Library Consultant State Library of Iowa

Tango tops book-challenge list
Not all penguin stories are equal in the public’s mind. And Tango Makes Three, an award-winning children’s book by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell and based on a true story about two male penguins who raised a baby penguin, topped the ALA annual list of works that attracted the most complaints from parents, library patrons, and others. Overall, the number of challenged books in 2006 jumped to 546, more than 30% higher than the previous year....
Associated Press, Aug. 28

16-year-old cracks $84-million Australian porn filter in half an hour
A Melbourne schoolboy has cracked the Australian government’s new $84-million internet porn filter in minutes. Tom Wood, 16, said it took him just over 30 minutes to bypass the filter, released on August 21. His technique ensures the software’s toolbar icon is not deleted, leaving parents with the impression the filter is still working. A former cyberbullying victim, Wood feared a computer-savvy child could work out the bypass and put it online for others to use....
Melbourne (Vict.) Herald Sun, Aug.

AASL e-Academy offers five fall courses
Starting October 1, AASL e-Academy will offer five online CE programs in partnership with the University of North Texas LE@D project. The offerings include creating websites, children’s literature, copyright, multicultural literature, and reluctant readers. Registration is available September 7–25....

YALSA has four fall courses
YALSA will offer four online courses in October: booktalks, new technologies and literacies, gaming, and YALSA competencies. Registration opened August 27 and runs to September 17....

Two new YALSA discussion lists
YALSA has created two new electronic discussion lists: teachyal, which offers resources and discussion for those currently teaching children’s and young adult literature; and yalsa-lockdown, which discusses issues unique to librarians serving incarcerated youth. To subscribe, visit the YALSA website....

The U.S. Geological Survey Central Regional Library in Denver has an online image collection providing access to more than 35,000 photographs, searchable by keyword, taken during geologic studies of the United States and its territories from 1868 to the present. It contains images of rock formations, fossils, mines and quarries, earthquakes, floods, volcanoes, national parks and monuments, archaeological sites, and geologists. The site is regularly updated with new photographs and collections.

ICE is nice
Andrew Pace writes: “Bowker Syndetics now has an interesting catalog-enhancement product called ICE (Indexed Content Enrichment). What if you could have all the enrichment and index it with your MARC data? New catalogs, such as AquaBrowser, Endeca, Primo, and Encore, will certainly help this idea along, but we need more research. Indexing first chapters, reviews, tables of contents, flyleafs, and annotations, and turning media awards and fiction files into faceted navigation elements does not necessarily improve relevance ranking. It can provide recall where there was none before, but relevance is something different. And how will any of this compare with full-text (especially book-length text) relevance ranking?”...
Hectic Pace blog, Aug. 29

Take the automation trend survey
Libraries are invited to participate in a survey that Marshall Breeding, director for innovative technologies and research at Vanderbilt University Libraries, is conducting on library automation products and companies. The survey consists of 11 questions about your satisfaction with the library automation system currently in place in your library, your opinion regarding the company that provides these products, and any general ideas that you may have for your next library automation system....
Library Technology Guides

It’s time to stand up to your email
Andrea Coombes writes: “Thanks to the avalanche of messages they receive every day, many professionals and office workers say they suffer from email overload. It doesn’t have to be that way.” One way to deal is the two-minute rule: “Anything you can finish in two minutes you should do right then.” Others: “Push emails out of your in-box and onto a tasks list,” and “turn off ‘you have mail’ alerts that interrupt you as you work.”...
Wall Street Journal, Aug. 26

Finding DRM-free music online
Mark Hendrickson writes: “Over the past half year we have seen arguably the most significant change in the online music industry since Apple launched their iTunes store in 2003. Following Steve Jobs’s open letter clarifying Apple’s position on digital rights management in Februrary, major record companies have begun providing their music online free of piracy protection mechanisms. Try out the DRM-free online music retailers here to get better-quality music that plays on virtually any handheld music device, on any computer, and with any music program.”...
TechCrunch blog, Aug. 24

Top 100 undiscovered websites
OK, some of you undoubtedly know about many of these, but this is what PC Magazine editors have chosen as fun, new sites that grabbed their attention this year. You’ll see a large collection of web applications and tech sites, blogs, offbeat social networks, and a handful of addictive Flash games for those slow days at work. Some of these sites are completely under the radar and get very little traffic; others are hugely popular within a specific demographic. Arranged by broad categories....
PC Magazine, Aug. 27

Survey of the Biblioblogosphere 2007
Meredith Farkas offers some findings from her recent survey of library bloggers: “33.6% of all library bloggers work in academic libraries and 29.3% are public librarians”; and “Want to be happy? Well, you may want to become a school librarian, work in a law library, or work for a consortium or library system, because those three got the highest scores for job satisfaction.”...
Information Wants To Be Free blog, Aug. 25

Scratch-and-sniff e-books
In a Zogby poll of 600 college students, 43% identified smell—either new-book smell or old—as the thing they most love about books as physical objects. So beginning in September, CaféScribe, a company that sells e-textbooks, will send every purchaser a scratch-and-sniff sticker with a certifiably musty “old book” smell....
CaféScribe, Aug. 23

Calisthenics for the older mind
Americans spend hundreds of millions of dollars on brain-building digital toys like Baby Einstein for preschoolers, so it was only a matter of time before a parade of “Grandpa Einsteins” followed suit. In the past year, some half-dozen programs, with names like Brain Fitness Program 2.0, MindFit, and Brain Age2, have aimed at aging consumers eager to keep their mental edge....
New York Times, Aug. 26

In Google they trust
An eye-tracking experiment at Cornell University revealed that college students have a substantial trust in Google’s ability to rank results by true relevance to the query. When participants selected a link to follow from Google’s result pages, their decisions were strongly biased towards links higher in position, even if the abstracts themselves were less relevant. While the participants reacted to artificially reduced retrieval quality by greater scrutiny, they failed to achieve the same success rate....
Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 12, no. 3 (2007)

Changes at Google Scholar
Barbara Quint writes: “In its own quiet way, Google Scholar has become a major force in scholarly communication. For many researchers, faculty, and students, it is the first search tool used, challenging the popularity and utility of veteran databases licensed—often at considerable cost—by academic and corporate libraries. Yet announcements about changes in the constantly evolving service seem to occur rarely and with little ballyhoo. For example, did you know that Google Scholar has launched its own digitization project, separate from the high-profile Google Book Search mass digitization?”...
Information Today NewsBreaks, Aug. 27

Public library blogs
Former AL columnist Walt Crawford has written a book called Public Library Blogs: 252 Examples, a Cites & Insights book. He writes: “I’m hoping this book will help librarians see whether blogs might work for their library by offering a range of examples that speak more directly to their situation. I’m also hoping that showing the diversity of specialized public library blogs will be useful to those considering such blogs.”...
Walt at Random blog, Aug. 27

“Tree of Books” desktop wallpaper
Vladstudio is a design company run by graphics enthusiast and digital artist Vlad Gerasimov of Irkutsk, Russia. In his spare time he creates free computer desktop wallpaper, such as this “Tree of Books,” which has a certain appeal for booklovers. He also has “Google Library” and a clever inverse water-for-land map that might appeal to map librarians....
Vladstudio

10,000 lists on WorldCat since June
More than 10,000 personalized lists have been created within WorldCat.org since its social networking feature was introduced in June. You can build as many lists as you like on any subject—lists like Genealogy: What’s New in 2007 or Oddly Titled Government Documents. All you need is an email address to create a free WorldCat account....
OCLC

Old librarians don’t die . . .
This collection of clever aphorisms (MP3 file) on how various types of librarians don’t die was written and performed by law librarians at the University of Minnesota. As they say, “Law librarians don’t die, their statute of limitations just runs out.”...
Law Librarian Blog, Aug. 17

Disco dancing for peace in the biblioblogosphere
Libraryman Michael Porter took JibJab’s “Starring You” disco video and pasted his and Michael Gorman’s faces on the freestyling duo. He writes: “Think of the promos libraries could do with a carefully planned marketing program using something like this (perhaps letting patrons stick themselves in a famous book setting, etc?). I must confess that upon seeing the results I couldn’t help but wonder ‘should I have just read a chapter or two in a book instead of making this?’ Naaaah, who am I kidding, this was time well spent!”...
Libraryman blog, Aug. 20

Another Library Man answers questions in Modesto
Brad Barker, librarian at Mark Twain Junior High School in Modesto, California, has a new (potentially recurring) column in the Modesto Bee where he provides answers, some flippant, others informative, to such questions as: “Q: If the famous royal library at Alexandria hadn’t been burned in ancient times, wouldn’t human civilization be advanced hundreds of years ahead of where we are today? A: Yes, we’d all have flying cars like the Jetsons, and we’d never have invaded Iraq.”...
Modesto (Calif.) Bee, Aug. 29

LIBRARY SERVICE AREA BOARD MEETING -- The public is encouraged and welcome to attend.

NORTHEAST IOWA LIBRARY SERVICE AREA

Board Meeting Reinbeck Sept 10, 2007 2:00 - 4:00

The Garnavillo Public Library has made an application to Hamburger Helper for automatic door openers for the library. Comments in support of the project can be posted on the Hamburger Helper website at http://www.hamburgerhelper.com.. Click on find a project and follow the directions.

Thank you, Mary Fran Nikolai, Director
Mary Fran Nikolai (Email) (URL) - 09 01 07 - 11:00