Using Focus Groups to Learn About Her Wiki

Merrie Davidson, the psychology, sociology, and linguistics librarian at the University of Florida in Gainesville, has a great article by this title in the January 2008 issue of Computers in Libraries.

As a former reference librarian, I was immediately intrigued by how she used her blog turned wiki as an extension of the consultation she was already providing to individual students and faculty. It seemed like a great way to disseminate information to a broader audience.

After reading the results of her focus groups, I'm curious to see how and if NEFLIN members are reading our blog and using our wikis. Hmmmm.... sounds like we might need to get Merrie to come lead a workshop.

Document Shredding

Last year NEFLIN decided to scan our financial files for the last umpteen years and destroy the paper that has been taking up much needed space in the office. (Ever wonder what all those white banker's boxes were storing?) Once we began the process we realized the next dilemma was, how do we now destroy all this paper with personal information included. So we've slowly been shredding away.

This week we found a fabulous, FREE, solution that I thought everyone should know about. Challenge Enterprises of North Florida, a nonprofit agency that employs more than 270 developmentally challenged adults, has a program called Shred for Good. On the second Thursday each month, they are in a nearby parking lot here in Orange Park collecting documents to be shredded in their government-certified facility.

For more information about the operation call 252-9786 or 1-866-771-3567.

New Date for "Writing for the Web" Workshop

The NEFLIN workshop "Writing for the Web" has been rescheduled to Wednesday, March 5 from 9:00 am - 4:00 pm at NEFLIN headquarters in Orange Park.

Trainer Karen Schneider will cover many types of online writing from blogs to newsletters.

There are still seats available - register today!

Libraries Serving People without Permanent Homes

The Social Responsibilities Round Table of the American Library Association spotlights how some libraries are serving people without homes, including the Jacksonville Public Library.

The Jacksonville Public Library teaches Internet use to homeless job seekers

San Franciso Public Library staff refer homeless people to housing and mental health service agencies

The Free Library of Philadelphia employs homeless people at their Central Library

The Los Angeles Public Library hosts a summer camp for homeless children

New York Public Library has monthly story time sessions for homeless children

2008 Middle Manager Symposiums

Help select topic for the 2008 Middle Manager Symposiums

The State Library and Archives of Florida, in partnership with several multi-type library cooperatives, annually offers Middle Manager Symposiums for mid-level managers, associate and assistant directors. The purpose of this professional development opportunity is for the participants to

· Learn new or improve existing leadership skill sets
· Gain valuable insights and ideas from library contemporaries and experts
· Build broader communities of practice
· Share best practices and innovative ideas

Feel free to forward the survey link to other staff in middle management positions in Florida libraries.

http://www.seflin.org/survey.cfm?fuseaction=themesurvey.main&surveyID=62

Courier Service Tests New Barcode Tracking System

TBLC has announced beta testing of a new barcode label system for the statewide courier service. The result of this will be better tracking, more accurate statistics, and vendor accountability for lost or late items.

Testing is going on in the Tampa and Ft. Myers areas right now. Look for this to expand to other parts of the state soon.

Read all the details here.

Patty at ALA Midwinter in Philadelphia

I will be attending the ALA Midwinter Conference in Philadelphia, and will be out of the office from January 9 through January 14.

I am a Board Member of the ALA CLENE Round Table, which stands for Continuing Library Education Network and Exchange. At Midwinter we will be planning the CLENE events for ALA Annual in Anaheim in June 2008 as well as Chicago in 2009. These include conference and pre-conference programs, the Staff Development Discussion Group and the popular Training Showcase.

If you have any thing you would like me to check out for you at Midwinter, email me and I will do my best to be there!

Do You Want Free Stuff in 2008-2009?

Take the Survey

NEFLIN has begun planning new services for 2008-09. In preparation for writing grants that will fund these projects, we are asking for input from NEFLIN members. The survey will be available until Friday, January 18th and should only take about 10-15 minutes to complete. We encourage you to share the survey with others in your member library who would be interested in participating.

Take the Survey

FLA Seeks Nominations for Awards

Do you work at an excellent library? Are you working with an outstanding librarian? Has your Friends group created something special for your community? The Florida Library Association is seeking for nominations for a variety of awards that will be presented at the 2008 FLA Conference in St. Petersburg.

• FLA Leader of the Year


• Librarian of the Year


• Library of the Year


• Lifetime Achievement Award


• The Trustees & Friends Library Award


• Outstanding Citizen Library Award


• Betty Davis Miller Youth Service Award (deadline 2/1/08)


• Intellectual Freedom Award


• Library Website Awards


• Friends, Foundations and Boards Awards (recognizing outstanding newslettr, membership drive, special event and special project)

Deadlines for Award Applications is Friday, February 15, 2008. For further information about the awards, including deadlines and criteria, visit FLA’s website.

Florida Library Legislative Days

Florida Library Legislative Days have been scheduled for February 19 and 20 in Tallahassee. The Florida Library Association puts on this annual event so that you can have an opportunity to meet with state legislators to discuss funding for libraries.

Registration Information

NEFLIN Members Receive CLIC Grants

Eleven library systems will receive a total of $96,000 in available Community Libraries in Caring (CLIC) grant funds this year.

The purpose of the CLIC program is to assist small, rural public libraries to improve library collections and services, improve adult and family literacy, and develop economic viability.

Six of the Eleven grants were awarded to NEFLIN Members! (There is some really great grant writing going on in northeast Florida)

• Alachua County Library District
• Levy County Public Library System
  
• New River Public Library Cooperative (2 grants)
• Sumter County Public Library
• Suwannee River Regional Library

More on the projects that were funded.

Y'all make me proud!

10 Ways to Make Your Library Great in 2008

Wednesday, January 16, 2:00 - 3:00 pm ET

As you think about your resolutions for the New Year, why not resolve to make your library a great educational asset within your community? This webinar will show you how to leverage social networking tools such as del.icio.us and LibraryThing to enable knowledge sharing and create collections of information around professional development. Ten key themes are presented to empower library staff as well as to increase a library's value within the community. Presented by guest speaker Ed Rossman, adult services librarian at Shaker Heights Public Library and author of Castles Against Ignorance: How to Make Libraries Great Educational Environments.

Note that registration for this webinar is optional. If you wish to register and receive email reminders with instructions for attending, please visit the WebJunction Calendar of Events. Otherwise you may follow these instructions to attend.

SirsiDynix Institute Event Archives

If you're like me, you just can't make it through the holidays without thinking about library training. It's a good thing there are free one-hour web conference replays from the SirsiDynix Institute Event Archives that are accessible from your PC at anytime.

Some recent web conferences include:

• Guide to Roving: An Essential Service for Library 2.0
• You're An Expert In Library Operations And You're Ready For Your Next Career Move - Is Your Resume?
• A Little More Help from your Friends: Social Bookmarking
• Dump the Org. Chart: Get `Er Done!: Management for a 2.0 Library

Check out more than 90 other topics today from the SirsiDynix Institute.

Ben Franklin Exhibit comes to Jacksonville Public Library

The American Library Association (ALA) Public Programs Office, in collaboration with the Benjamin Franklin Tercentenary, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is pleased to announce that 40 public and academic libraries have been selected to host the traveling exhibition, Benjamin Franklin: In Search of a Better World.

Jacksonville Public Library is the only library in Florida that will be hosting this exhibit. It will be in Jacksonville from June 4 - July 25, 2008.

The exhibit will give public audiences the opportunity to explore and to talk about Franklin's life, his contributions to the founding of this country, and his high standards for work, citizenship, and contribution to community. It will look at his background, his self-education, and his philosophical and religious beliefs and their effect on his work and life. It will show Franklin in the context of the eighteenth century and as a product of his times -- a brilliant and rather unconventional product of his times -- rather than as the venerable bespectacled and grandfatherly figure with whom we are all familiar.

The traveling panel exhibit consisting of six sections of colorful, freestanding photo-panels incorporating representations of artifacts from the original Franklin exhibition.

FLA seeks Leadership Intern and Fellows

The Florida Library Association (FLA) is accepting nominations until January 31, 2008 for their Leadership Intern and Fellows program. These two positions can give you an opportunity to gain experience working as part of an elected governing body and learn more about our state association.

A Leadership Intern is an individual who may be new to working in a library and to the concept of Association involvement.

A Leadership Fellow is an individual who has library experience and who wants to explore ways of becoming more involved in organizational governance, programming, and initiatives of the Florida Library Association.

• All candidates must be members of the Florida Library Association.
• Candidates must have the approval of their employers and are expected to attend all FLA Board meetings and the FLA Annual Conference.
• Appointments are for one year (April 2008 - April 2009).

If you are interested, contact Brad at NEFLIN.

Ideas needed for NEFLIN's PERKY Planning Day

NEFLIN members,

The NEFLIN staff are meeting next Thursday for our annual Planning Day. We are asking that you send ideas for new services or items that we might include in upcoming grant applications.

If you miss getting this to us by Thursday, don't fret. We will be working on our grants all the way up to the deadline of March 15, 2008. So if you read this before then and have an idea...send it in.

A little about the "Perky" Planning Day. PERKY stands for "Promote, Expand, Retire, Keep, (and Y because we like you)". Each of the NEFLIN staff evaluate all of our current services against these criteria. We would then decide to promote a service that is underused, expand a service that is catching on, keep a service at its current level, or retire a service that is no longer valuable to our members.

NEFLIN Continuing Education Committee Meets

The NEFLIN Continuing Education Committee met on Wednesday, December 12 at NEFLIN HQ in Orange Park. The committee is made up of library staff from public, academic, special and school libraries and come from different locations throughout our territory.

Among the topics discussed were the results from the NEFLIN 2007 Annual Survey, the Fall and Winter Workshop Schedules, the re-designed NEFLIN Website and developing a basic cataloging class for paraprofessional staff. Future library tour suggestions and 2008-09 Grant Project ideas were solicited. The committee brainstormed about producing and sharing YouTube tutorials for library staff and patrons that could be posted on the NEFLIN website.

The NEFLIN CE Committee meets every other month to give suggestions and input, make recommendations to and work closely with the CE Coordinator, and help promote NEFLIN’s training and support services mission. If you are interested in joining us, committee openings will be announced in summer 2008.

NEFLIN Book Club Workshop featured in Booklist Online Blog

On Tuesday, December 11, great book club ideas were shared in the NEFLIN workshop "Common Grounds: Book Clubs for New and Experienced Readers and Leaders" led by trainer Kaite Mediatore Stover. Kaite, a librarian from the Kansas City Public Library is also a Booklist columnist and blogger. The workshop and several NEFLIN participants were featured in her blog called BookGroupBuzz.

Kaite will be back in the Spring to present "Programming to Promote Reading" which will focus on low cost and no-cost programming ideas for encouraging reading as a leisure activity in your library.Watch for details soon!

Changes at FLA

Change is in the air at the Florida Library Association.

Congratulations to Harold George of St. Johns County Public Library who was recently elected to the FLA Executive Board. Harold will serve as Director from 2008-2010. Other new officers are Wendy Breeden, Vice-President/President Elect, Alan Kornblau, Treasurer, Pamela Grigg, Director, Corinne Jorgensen, ALA Councilor, and Debra Sears, SELA Representative. The new officers will be installed at the FLA Annual Conference on April 25, 2008.

At their October meeting, the FLA Executive Board voted to open an FLA office in 2008 and staff it with FLA employees (a full time Executive Director and a part time bookkeeper/administrative assistant). Ruth O'Donnell, current Executive Director will be leaving in June 2008 to resume consulting. Interested, or know someone who might be suited for this position?

Don't forget, it's FLA renewal time - the new membership year begins January 1.

UF Microfilm Sales Program Returns

This was passed on to me by Cathy at UF.


"The University of Florida microfilm sales program has recently undergone a significant revitalization. Policies and procedures were updated and streamlined to increase efficiency and decrease turn around time. The price of one reel of 35 mm film is $55. Please see our microfilm sales web page at http://web.uflib.ufl.edu/preserve/microfilm_sales/index.html for details.

UF has a significant collection of city, county and regional newspapers from Florida on microfilm from the early 1900’s up to December of 2004. From January of 2005 forward, newspapers are being imaged and many are available online at http://www.uflib.ufl.edu/UFDC/?c=fdnl1

I am the Microfilm Sales coordinator for the program. If you would like to order any film from UF or find out what titles we may have that you need in your collection, please do not hesitate to get in touch with me."

Cathy Martyniak, Chair

Preservation Dept. University of Florida, Smathers Libraries

(352) 273-2830 cathy@uflib.ufl.edu

New Report on Social Networks and Privacy

George Needham, OCLC's Vice-President of Member Services, was at NEFLIN on August 1 and previewed this report. Now we get to see the final version.

Sharing, Privacy and Trust in Our Network World is a very interesting read. The Report Highlights section gives you some nice bite-size nuggets to chew on:

The Web community has migrated from using the Internet to building it. In 2005, just 16% of respondents used blogs; today that number approaches 50%. Approximately a quarter of the general public respondents have created Web pages and used chat rooms and social networking sites. The Internet’s readers are rapidly becoming its authors.

The emergence of a new classification of “social” Web sites is changing the construction and culture of the Web. In these shared spaces, users are not only the audience, but they create content, design pages and architect entirely new social networks. We have moved from an Internet built by a few thousand authors to one constructed by millions.

The general public respondents are more likely to have used a social networking or social media site (28%) than to have searched for or borrowed items from a library Web site (20%).

Much of what takes place on social spaces is motivated by a desire to increase personal interaction. My friends use the same site (66%) is the top criteria in using a social networking site. To network or to meet new people, The Web site is fun and to be part of a group or community are also top social networking site selection criteria.

Library Tour: Bradford County Public Library

On Thursday, December 6, a group of NEFLIN members enjoyed a tour of the new Bradford County Public Library which had its grand opening on October 26. Library Director Phalbe Henriksen showed us the library and shared stories of her experiences bringing it to completion after 12 years of planning.

At 20,000 square feet, the beautiful new environmentally "green" library is five times the size of the old building and features a spacious Cracker-style interior with 25 foot ceilings, natural lighting, bamboo-inspired ceiling fans and vertical shades, and large niches and wall space for future art work and museum pieces that will be displayed. The tropically hued carpet is complemented by bold accent walls throughout the building. A joint use classroom with Santa Fe Community College, computer lab and large meeting room are other features there were not possible in the old cramped library building. The new room will be the location of a NEFLIN Storytelling workshop in March.

The library was busy with patrons, computer users and students coming in after school. We look forward to many years of happy use for the Bradford County Public Library.

St. Johns Staff Development Day

Yesterday St. Johns County Public Library System had a Celebration of Their Past, Present and Future in the St. Johns County Convention Center at World Golf Village. It began with a look at the library system's past by Karen Harvey, author of several books about St. Augustine's history. Members of the audience added their recollections, including a story from a Friend of the Library (and current staff member) about moving from a store front into the stand alone Bartram Trail branch, "we thought we had died and gone to heaven. And when the renovated, we knew we were in heaven." These are the Friends every library needs! This was followed by a presentation on the Future of Libraries by Larry Dennis, Dean of the FSU College of Information.

The fabulous cuban themed lunch included a slide presentation highlighting staff activities throughout the year. Lunch was followed by a true celebration of the past, present and future that included recognition of every staff member for their years of service, the passing of the baton to the Debra Rhodes Gibson, the new library director, and recognition of speakers with the presentation of a book donated to the library in their honor (what a great idea!!)

As many of you know, the library's director, Mary Jane Little, will be retiring in January 2008. There was a special tribute to Mary Jane including comments from her thanking four people who have been instrumental in her success, Paul Donovan (FSU), Dean Harold Goldstein (FSU), former County Administrator Nick Meiszer and current Assistant County Administrator for Community Services Jerry Cameron. This was followed by a comments from several friends and colleagues and the presentation of a beautiful rocking chair by the county commissioners.

After all the guests left staff moved on to the portion of the day just for them. Because so many changes are in store as Mary Jane leaves, they brought in Carol Price to lead them through The Change Challenge - a 4-step process.

The day ended with door prizes for EVERYONE! It was a wonderful day of celebration. Staff seemed pumped up and ready to go take on the world once again.

Patty's Paris Report

NEFLIN Friends,

I traveled to Paris, France over the Thanksgiving holiday and had a wonderful time. The weather was cold and there was a transit strike on during most of the time I was there, but it is so beautiful and there is so much to see I had a great time.

I traveled solo and joined a Rick Steves tour group, getting to know people from all over the US (my roommate was a teacher from Seattle). Our hotel was very near to the Eiffel Tower and Rue Cler. My sightseeing included the Louvre, Musee d'Orsay, the Grand Palais, Musee Carnavalet (Paris history), Sainte Chapelle, Musee Cluny, Les Invalides (including the World War I and II museum), Notre Dame, Sacre Coeur and Montmartre, the Marais district and the Latin Quarter, Versailles, many beautiful churches, and a cruise on the Seine. The food, shopping and people were all superb.

There was a lot I didn't have time to do and have a list of places to visit or return to for my next trip.

Personal Learning Experience Webinar - 12/5/07

Start You Up! The Personal Learning Experience for Library Staff and other Busy Professionals
Wednesday, December 5, 2007 from 2-3pm ET

The new term "Personal Learning Experience" refers to a concept of highly individualized, non-structured e-learning built by the user to meet his or her own needs. Also known as a "PLE," it can be a mix of educational computer software or applications, Internet pages, Web 2.0 tools and creativity. During this webinar, look at the most popular start pages like iGoogle, Netvibes and Pageflakes, and learn how to create your own private, educational website about almost any topic you choose! Presented by Marianne Lenox, Huntsville Madison County Public Library Staff Training and Development Coordinator.

Note that registration for this webinar is optional. If you wish to register and receive email reminders with instructions for attending, please visit the WebJunction Calendar of Events. Otherwise you may follow these instructions to attend.

WebJunction is pleased to announce that the Learning Webinars are now closed captioned! Captioning will be available for both the live event and when viewing the recording.