New ALALearning Post: Finding Your Voices

I have a new post up at the ALALearning blog (the official blog of the LearnRT: The Learning Round Table of ALA. Formerly CLENE. Say that three times fast!)

Check it out: Finding Your Voice(s)

Make ALA Connect Work For You: An appeal for Notifications ON!

UPDATE 7/28/09, 3:00 PM: Check out Jenny Levine's post on changes coming to ALA Connect--esp. regarding improvements in notifications!
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I'm excited, hopeful, and joyously optimistic about ALA Connect, ALA's hybrid social network, bulletin board, listserv, calendar, project management tool.

Like all networks ALA Connect is only as useful and powerful as the number people that use it; and in fact it is getting exponentially more useful and powerful with each new user.

The more I use the ALA Connect, the more I realize that selectively turning on Email Notifications is key (for me) to integrating Connect into my professional life. This ensures that updates (the ones I want anyway) are pushed out to me, which is important as I only tend to pay attention to whatever wanders into my field of vision...

I'm appealing to you, dear reader; help ALA Connect thrive and grow by logging in and turning on your notifications too--and help spread the word by posting this attractively designed and competitively-priced banner ad (in both border and non-border stylings you'll notice) on your blog, homepage, or social network of choice. Extra points for tattooing directly upon your body. No pictures please, I'll take your word for it.

Another feature I've found useful for keeping up in Connect is the ability to view my unread messages through the "My Unread" page and feed. Links to your "My Unread" content can be found on the lower right of the ALA Connect page under "Community Notifications". (These links will work for you if you're logged in to ALA Connect--otherwise you're seeing "access denied" messages.)

To learn more about ALA Connect, check out the these great video tutorials created by Emerging Leaders Group I (aka Melissa Dessent, Ahniwa Ferrari, Jaime Hammond, Jennifer Jarson, Jason Kucsma). The videos are in the process of being uploaded to ALA Connect proper.

Thanks everyone, see you on ALA Connect!

New Library Blog: CEBuzz!

There's a new library blog that might be of interest to Library Garden readers: CEBuzz. CEBuzz is a group blog brought to you by ALA's Continuing Library Education Network and Exchange Round Table, aka, CLENE. (I've been active in CLENE for years and am currently coordinating the new blog.)

The mission of CEBuzz is to provide a thought-provoking resource for those interested in and responsible for Continuing Education (CE) and staff development in libraries. To that end, the the blog will:

• Provide coverage of trends in learning theory and practice
• Provide links to online learning resources
• Provide coverage of “hot topics” in CE and staff development
• Announce learning events of interest

I think we've put together a great team of authors, who've already generated some wonderful posts. So if you're interested in continuing education and/or staff development check us out. Or just pop our feed into your reader: http://feeds.feedburner.com/CeBuzz.

Oh, and if you're an ALA member and interested in joining CLENE for a mere $20 (and getting a free preferred professional membership in the American Management Association thrown in) you can add us to your membership right online.

Tags: ALA, CLENE, clenert, continuing education, staff development, libraries

Not Attending ALA? Here's an Alternative...

This is posted many places but I want to be sure that no one misses it!


Not able to attend ALA but still want to find out what's going on in cutting edge technology and social software!? Well check out the BIGWIG Social Software Showcase...

From their page:

The Social Software Showcase is an online unconference occurring around and during the time of ALA Annual 2007.
On this wiki, you will find eleven wonderful presentations on cutting edge technology and social software by librarians and leaders in the field. Regardless of where you are in the world, you will have the opportunity to discuss the presentations here in this space.
We will also be having a face to face roundtable discussion with some of our presenters at ALA Annual in Washington D.C. on Saturday, June 23rd, from 1:30-2:30 in the Renaissance Mayflower Cabinet Room. If you are in D.C. please come and join us.
This wiki will be a work in progress as we iron out a few things, including the embedding of the presentations. But we'll be ready and running before ALA! [end]

This is a revolutionary way of presenting information! Please do check it out.

The presenters include the VERY excellent:

Michael Casey - Library Crunch
Michael Porter, aka Library Man! - Library Man blog
Jessamyn West - Librarian.net blog
Karen Schneider - Free Range Librarian
Her post on this.
AND MORE!

You can read another excellent post on this for some more information on the Information Wants to Be Free blog here.

The Bigwig Social Software Showcase is here .

Check it out! :-)

Happy Weekend!

ALA Midwinter in Seattle

At some point I'll post some thoughts about ALA Midwinter, but at least I've gotten my pix uploaded to Flickr.

For a variety of reasons, this midwinter meeting was one of the most useful, practical and fun conferences I've been to. There were a few people that I had hoped to see and didn't (my fault for not reaching out--I always think "Oh, I'll run into them at..."), but generally speaking the social networking was superb, the meetings were highly informative, the food was yummy, as were the local spirits--what few sips I had here and there -- and the rain pretty much held off.

More when I get a chance.

Technorati Tags: ALA_MW_2007, MW2007, ala2007, LibraryGarden, Libraries