Passion Quilt Meme

The undeniably amazing Greg Schwartz tagged me for the Passion Quilt Meme. The point is to take a photo from Flickr’s Creative Commons and caption it with a statement that you feel passionate about for children.

Oh so easy? Yes and no.

It was easy to take an absurd amount of time to look at photos and marvel at the creativity and elegance of so many photographers.

It was not so easy to pick just one.

But, here is my pick.


My caption, "There are green fields in us all" helps me remember that no matter what happens to pull on me, to distract me, to disable me...and those things happen...there is a space within that is serene, that is open, that is natural, that is free of obstruction and abstraction. There is a green field in us all.

How does this apply to libraries?
Ask Jenica, who plowed forward the other day, keeping her head in the game while she dealt with frustrations, annoyances, as well as small rewards.
Ask Aaron, who reminds us that life is wonderful and sometimes messy as we deal with patrons and problems of all shapes and sizes.

Those two posts really helped me decide on my caption.

I am passionate about optimism. We would be kidding ourselves and the children this meme is meant for if we didn't admit that things happen, get in the way, don't go according to plan, or fall apart. They invariably do. But there are green fields in us all. Within them, there are solutions, alternatives, cool breezes, and up ahead.

Who's on deck?
David Silver
Rudi Leon
Eric Sizemore
Cliff Landis
Brandi Tuttle

Back

I am back.
I am
sun kissed
still listening for the ocean at the back of my ear
itching from a sunburn
well slept
relaxed and
happy.

Vacations are good things. Take one.

On Vacation

The Sheck is heading out this afternoon for a much needed vacation. After a long winter, a tough semesters, and a lot of transition in our lives, we are heading to sunny Florida to put our translucent, Vermont bods into the sun and sea. I am ready for it! And looking forward to getting through some good beach reading. I'll let you know how makes the cut upon my return.

ALA Rocks National Library Week on YouTube

ALA gets a lot of flack. But this time, they nailed it. Check out these videos to celebrate National Library Week. Funny, informative, 2.0, catchy. We blogged them for our library blog and already showed them to soome students, who laughed. Out loud. Good job ALA.







There are more! So search National Library Week on You Tube and share them with your library!

Loving Feevy Today

While I know there are 1000 reasons for my RSS feeds, there is something wonderful about Feevy. After meeting such an incredible slew of creative, dynamic, and freakin smart librarians at CiL, I have finally had the chance to add just a few of them to the Feevy roll. I also had the chance to add some actual faces to blogs I have been reading for a while and just never knew the faces behind the words.

And that's what I love. While I doubt I will make my way to Internet Librarian, so I might not actually meet up with many of these people face-to-face again for a year, Feevy let's me keep that face to that name on my blog. And that has value to me. Especially when I have portraits like those from Cindi Trainor to use as the thumbnail.

So I look forward to reading a lot of these blogs and glad I can think about how much I enjoyed finding out about them as they come down the blog roll

Didn't Catch MY presentation?

Here are the slides from my presentation at Computers in Libraries, "Taking 2.0 to the Faculty". Thank you to everyone who made it to the very last slot of the conference. I enjoyed hearing what others are doing at their institutions and I hope we will have more opportunities to talk about a topic I find really important and interesting.

First Thoughts on Computers in Libraries

First word that comes to mind when I think Computers in Libraries: WOW.

It's going to take me a few posts to decompress, discuss, and distribute even some of what I got out of this conference. But WOW sums it up nicely. Let me take just a moment to present a few stand outs:

1. People: I was amazed at the people I met at this conference. People who are doing innovative and exciting things at their libraries, people who are taking risks, people who are asking questions about technology, usability, and access, people who are sharing and learning from others. I am all about all of that. Part of this evening is all about updating the Feevy with new blogs to keep my eyes on. Part of the next few days will be playing with tools and applications that I either had dismissed too easily or just hadn't ever heard of. Awesome.

2. The Dutch: three librarians from the Delft Public Library presented a Keynote on Tuesday about their tour across the United States to talk to people about their experiences in libraries and the stories we create. So creative, so interesting, so original. Here is a helpful run down of the keynote. I had the very good fortune to sit down with Erik Boekesteijn to talk for a while about his impressions of American libraries, our focus on technology, libraries in the Netherlands, and the impact technology could or does have on society. I am all about all of that. One interesting tidbit we discussed, and I will think on and blog about later, is librarian’s obsession with blogging. More to come on that in a different post.

3. Local 2.0: Charles Lyons made an amazing presentation about ways libraries can engage their communities to tap our knowledge about our own communities to make the web and 2.0 technology more meaningful in our own backyards. Again, I am all about all of that! It was inspiring, interesting, and flat out awesome, especially to this Vermonter. My next job is to find a way to get Charles up to VT to speak: I think a lot of people here in the Green Mountain State would enjoy hearing what he has to say and would act on his suggestions for doing more locally with the web.

4. A refreshed belief in the power of libraries: as the end of the school year roll’s around and winter is only just beginning to fade in Vermont, I was feeling a tad tired before Computers in Libraries. But this conference refreshed my belief in what interesting places libraries are, how diverse our perspectives are in terms of how libraries can be important and effective in our communities, how many cool technologies there are to help us in that pursuit, but also, how important it is to advocate for deliberate decision making without sacrificing a sense of play and exploration. That is one thing I tried to get at in my own presentation. And certainly something I try to get at here in my blog.

Springboarding ahead, but still with a lot to learn

So happy to see this post on the ACRLog and the Springboard event. And it makes me happy on a variety of fronts.

First, I am glad that librarians were able to listen to Henry Jenkins, an author and speaker whom I respect and enjoy reading a great deal. My students read his Convergence Culture in my Society and Technology class and always with great results: lively discussion and challenging questions.

Second, as I continue to prep for Computers in Libraries, I think the points made about ways in which we need to facilitate the collaborative and interactive nature of information and the world for students can be taken even further. What about the faculty? Innovative thinkers like Jenkins notwithstanding, most faculty need librarians to act as facilitators through the overwhelming load of information too!

Third, I am so glad that the talk and the post deal with the issue of students who do not have round the clock access to computers or the web. Again, I think we are often so concerned with those students who are bopping around the web freely that we sometimes forget there are other users too.

My only criticism is that there is not a "play it again" feature. I was signed up for the event but at the last minute had to attend a meeting. For an meeting that advocated for librarians to have up to date technology skills, offering the chance to download the talk for later listening shows that we do still have a lot to learn.