Happy Blog Day 2007!

Today is the 3rd Annual Blog Day and I thought I would play along by listing my 5 "new and/or interesting" blogs. I won't be giving much of a description for each blog I list due to a time crunch (aka packing for a vacation at Disney) and I will not be blogging again until mid-September at the earliest. I am leaving my laptop behind and unplugging for the entire vacation. Without further ado, my five "Blog Day Blogs":

Cupcake Bakeshop by Chockylit -- I love everything about cupcakes, especially experimenting with new recipes. I also love to read about them and Cupcake Bakeshop gives me lots of visuals to see the process. I actually follow more than one cupcake blog and I have to say that I read and adore Cupcakes Take the Cake equally as well. So many cupcakes, so little time.

Sandusky History -- I received an email earlier this week from Dorene Paul, Reference Assistance at Sandusky Library in Ohio, that led me to a wonderful local history blog that is "inspired by the collections of the Sandusky Library Archives Research Center and Follett House Museum". The photos are fascinating, the accompanying stories are engaging. This is local history done right!

Trashionista -- Great for keeping up with chick-lit on both sides of the pond. They have a great tagline too: "We read books like they're going out of fashion".

MomsRising Blogs -MomsRising is a grassroots, online effort that has a goal of "bringing millions of people who all share a common concern about the need to build a more family-friendly America" and they have several bloggers helping to move their cause forward.

The Gadget Blog -- There are lots of gadget blogs that I check and read regularly, some well-known and others that are not. Keeping up with the world of gadgets is important to my job, even if my budget can rarely afford the newest and the coolest.

See everyone again in a few weeks -- enjoy the Labor Day weekend!

SRP 2007!

If you happen to feel jealous of those kids doing summer reading programs (and/or maybe jealous of their parents and/or children's librarians), here's your chance to get involved with some summer reading!

Some folks are doing an online Summer Reading Program! It's a blog, and there is a MySpace and a facebook for it - you can join and post your goals for summer reading, your books and your reviews. It's very casual and I think it looks like fun.... If you are already reading and posting books/reviews, etc., you can just keep posting there and you'll be linked on the SRP blog.... or you can send reviews to the blog.

Have you/could you consider setting up something like this for your patrons!? It's pretty darn simple, quick and easy (AND FREE!) to do and requires really very little work from YOU!

Think about it ....

I have joined as libraryamy (my gmail id) and created the facebook group. See the blog for blogger and MySpace info.

Happy reading!

Change and Growth - Amendment

Immediately after I posted that bit about "Change is inevitable. Growth is optional," right before the Futures Conference, I realized it needed an amendment. It needed me to add that I am such a hypocrite!

I am a huge advocate of using "2.0" things for libraries - blogs, wikis, podcasts, etc... and not being AFRAID of CHANGE and of doing some different things. And here I am, NOT blogging really! I posted that post and then went off to take a shower and it was there that I realized that I have to admit and face up to MY fears and issues if I am going to be talking to others about CHANGE - FEAR - GROWTH and their issues.

My fear is of not being perfect; not being good enough - liked - accepted; etc.... That is why I have been avoiding blogging. This is a true soul-baring admission. I want to blog. I often think of things to blog. Yet, I allow my fears to hold me back.

Well, no more! I am realizing my fears, admitting them, and challenging them. Just as I want to be able to challenge everyone else to do! So, as I go forth and blog and challenge you (hopefully) you can know that I do so with a clear conscious having admitted this and having started to face my own fears!

At the conference Robert said to me that people appreciate honesty and that's what is most important. Well, consider yourselves warned . . .

[Thanks to Robert and Pete for discussions surrounding this topic at the conference! It helped a lot!]

Plogging for Poetry Month!

Helene Blowers over at Library Bytes posted some "Podcast Thoughts" last week where she made the case for libraries to podcast about current events, topics and culture. Helene's thoughts mirror mine precisely. In fact, it is something that I have been thinking about for several months and it finally came to fruition on April 2nd with the official launch of the PPL Poetry Podcast Blog for National Poetry Month.

I wanted to call it the "PPL Poetry Plog" since it is a series of podcasts on a blog, but I thought that might be too confusing (and too much alliteration). I then wanted to call it Poetcast, but the folks at poets.org beat me to it. Not thrilled with the final name (last minute decision, just had to call it something), but I am thrilled with the results and how many readers we have had during the first 10 days. Our stats, in fact, are exceeding my expectations by leaps and bounds (over 225 viewers on most days and over to 2,000 views thus far). I know the statistics will get skewed by posting here, so I held off. I wanted to see how far we could take this with only local exposure and word of mouth. Others have found us already, such as the Book Blog at timesunion.com and that has thrilled me.

We have recorded 26 poets so far and hope to do a few more before the end of the month. The poets all come from the greater Princeton area and each poet brings a unique voice and perspective to the project. For instance, Paul Muldoon, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2003, did a beautiful reading of a pantoum for us and Enriqueta Carrington's poem was read by 2 poets in 2 languages while Judith McNally contributed a unique "microlouge". We have many more surprises in store for the rest of the month, including some wonderful poetry by a high school student.

This has been a real team project and with me every step of the way has been Evan Klimpl. Evan is one of our Tech Aides at PPL and I simply must give credit where credit is due. I may have had the original concept and coordinated the project, but it is Evan who responsible for doing 90% of the poetry recordings, cleaning up the files to make them sound professional, uploading the files, preparing many of the posts and anything else that I have requested. I can not thank Evan enough for embracing this project with the such enthusiasm and dedication. Also assisting with this project and deserving thanks are Bob Keith and Romina Gutierrez from PPL. And last, but certainly not least, in the early stages of this project my good friend John LeMasney gave me some invaluable advice about how we could do this project for free (which was one of my goals besides promoting poetry).

This is an idea that I hope other libraries will steal, because it is a project that can be done without having to make any investments -- except perhaps a decent microphone for recording ($35-50 maximum) if you don't already have one. Here is how we did it (in a nutshell):

• We used Audacity from sourceforge.net to record and edit the .mp3 files
• The blog was set up at wordpress.com -- this is the free version of wordpress and it works well for a project such as this
• Our .mp3 files are being hosted at archive.org
  
• The player that we are using to in the posts comes free with wordpress
• We took photos while the readings were being recorded to ensure consistency
  

This has been a terrific way for Princeton Public Library to experiment with how we want to implement podcasting in to our programs. We have lots of ideas and now that we have the process figured out we will hopefully be able to podcast more original content in the near future.