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May 7, 2007
Libraries Light the Way
The Long Island Library Conference was last week. It's a time for librarians, staff and administrators to get together and hear about issues that are impacting our profession. I went to two workshops that were particularly interesting to me. The first was "Communicating Electronically." There were several different speakers who discussed all of the exciting "social networking" tools we have available to us -- most of which are free or low cost! Barbara Moon, a young adult specialist from Suffolk County spoke about Shelfari and Library Thing. If you haven't heard of these fun, social, bookish tools yet, you probably should take a look. Then, the Director of the Lindenhurst Library spoke about how they're used podcasting in his library. The next topic up was instant messaging and the many library applications for it. And, lastly, Therese Nielson from Huntington spoke about blogging.
The key points about all of these tools is that they're low cost (or free), low risk (if they aren't successful, just move on), and all have the same objective -- to reach out to the public in many different ways.
The second session that I enjoyed was about Popular Culture and was done by Sophie Brookover and Elizabeth Burns -- both from New Jersey. They defined popular culture as "whatever people in the community are talking, thinking and reading about" -- whether it's from People magazine, The Daily Show, Fox News, NPR, blogs, iTunes, Flickr, etc. This means that the definition of pop culture will vary depending upon the age and interests of the people. Teens might be interested in facebook, utube and itunes, while baby boomers are thinking about retirement and health care costs.
I guess both workshops made the same point -- which is to know what matters to your community. For some, this just means going about their daily lives. For me, keeping up with popular culture is work -- it's fun, but it doesn't come easily to me. Fortunately for me, I have my children, my husband and my mother, who are all very "hip," and keep me in the know about music, movies, fashion, tv -- in terms of books, and the business of libraries, I'm on my own. That's why these workshops are so helpful.
Libraries lighting the way was the conference motto and I thought it very appropriate. We don't invent information, but we provide access to the public -- we illuminate the path to facilitate the finding of information.
Posted by Michele at May 7, 2007 9:23 AM
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