LibraryTrax

It is truly amazing how much having access to the Internet means to the workplace!!! The State Library is back in business and is connected to the Internet. Thanks go to our IT Department’s tenacity in locating the problem.

The State Library is experiencing an interruption in email and Internet access.  It started as a result of building maintenance, and we’re not sure how long it will take to resolve, so if you’ve emailed a staff member and haven’t gotten a response, please call. 

Information Services, DISCUS, and Collection Management have access, but Talking Book Services, Library Development, and Administration are still down. 

We’ll keep you posted and let you know when we’re back up to full speed.

A Prairie Home Companion’s Garrison Keillor has a great column on public libraries as an antidote to the ongoing frustrations of politics as usual.  Here’s a short excerpt…read the whole article here. 

“…When politics gets mean and dumb, you can cheer yourself up by walking into a public library, one of the nobler expressions of democracy…when I walk into the library near my house and see a couple hundred teenagers studying, most of them Hmong or Vietnamese, I see the old cheerful America that Washington has lost touch with, the land of opportunity…The library is the temple of freedom. Growing up, we kids were aware of how much of our lives was a performance for adults. In school, at church, in Scouts, adults were watching, cueing you, coaching, encouraging, commenting; but in the library, you didn’t have to perform for the librarian. She simply presided over an orderly world in which you had the freedom of your own imagination. The silence was not repressive but liberating: to allow your imagination to play, uninhibited by others…

Libraries have rushed forward into the new age (whichever one we’re in now), and the word “librarian” is out. They’re Information Professionals now, and it’s a Media Resource Center, and it’s wired to the max. Just as we novelists have become experiential document specialists producing sensory-data-based narratives encoded in a symbolic format that informally we refer to as English. But a library is still a library. It’s a place where serious people go to have the freedom to think without anybody poking and prodding them, in the company of other serious people who sit silently around us and yet encourage us in our own pursuits and projects.

The future of our country is not in the hands of bullies, it’s with the kids in the library who are doing the work. I am going to bet on that from now on.”

I’ve been finding more tutorials and videos to support your Learning 2.0 programs. They are all posted on our TechTrax Page. I am updating often and will post when I add new things.

Go watch the videos about Twitter from David Free and David Lee King.

• Welcome to the Twitterverse - Part One: By David Free. Part 1 of the BIGWIG Social Software Showcase occuring around and during the  ALA Annual 2007.. Video covers how to use Twitter and ideas in libraries. Scroll down the page to find great links about Twitter in libraries.
• Fluffin Yr Twitterz - The Fluff (or Part Two): By David Lee King. All the cool ways to extend Twitter (and have some fun in the process). Be sure to scrool down after the video to see all the links to more Twitter Fun.

I highly recommend watching the video from Meredith Farkas at Norwich University: Top Technology Trends.

She also blogs at libablog.org (Library and Informatino Technology Association).