New River Public Library Cooperative Staff Development Day

I got to spend a fun morning with the folks from New River Public Library Cooperative (NRPLC) yesterday for their First Annual Staff Development Day. NRPLC staff were joined by the staff from their member libraries in Bradford, Baker and Union Counties at the fabulous new Bradford County Public Library in Starke. I put my few photos up on flickr and here's a link to Ginny's pictures.

Ginny Bird provided a neat overview of where libraries had come from. She also provided a short tour of the Coops website and reminded the staff to watch the blog for regular updates. Ginny's doing a great job of keeping the blog current. And during the first break we got to take a tour of the bookmobile which is always fun.

I provided an overview of the Florida Electronic Library with highlights of the new PowerSearch interface and the Health & Wellness Resource Center and LitFinder. Training live is always iffy and yesterday proved to be no exception. We had a few IT problems but it was fun nonetheless. Some of the stuff I wanted them to know that might be new to some of you -

• don't forget the great digital content available on the FEL. The Florida Memory Project and Florida on Florida collections are fabulous resources.
• the Ask-a-Librarian service has migrated to a new platform. If you haven't tried it I would definitely encourage you to do so. They have the cool ability to take over your desktop.
• WorldCat.org let's you see which libraries near you own the item you're looking for. And there is a WorldCat application for Facebook (now if someone can just explain to me how to make that work).
• You can add those neat magazine logos that appear in the Popular Magazines & Journals section to your website to increase usage.
• and..... the new PowerSearch interface that has been implemented on the Florida Electronic Library is sooooooo very easy to use.

Perhaps next year this group will get to meet in the new Union County Public Library (check out their blog to see progress on the construction).