Summer is Here!

When we think of summer, we think of good summer reads on the beach and explorations to other day-trip destinations. So here is a list of resources to help you with some ideas and planning.

1. Summer Reading is everywhere! This year’s theme is “Be Creative @ Your Library” and you can watch a nice jingle about it on YouTube:
   

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdnyF5X-V0I

Free summer reading programs are to be found in Maryland public library systems.

Here is an alphabetical list – contact your county’s public library for further details, or better yet, just drop by and ask at your nearest local library!

1. Allegeny County: http://www.alleganycountylibrary.info
2. Anne Arundel: http://www.aacpl.net/src_09/index.html
3. Baltimore County: http://www.bcpl.info/kidspage/summerreading.html
4. Calvert County: http://calvert.lib.md.us/summer09/
5. Caroline County: http://www.carolib.org/library/
6. Carroll County: http://library.carr.org/
7. Cecil County: http://www.cecil.ebranch.info/kids/summer-reading/
8. Charles County: http://www.ccplonline.org/kids/summerreading09.html
9. Dorchester County: http://www.dorchesterlibrary.org/childrenservices.html
10. Enoch Pratt (Baltimore City): http://www.prattlibrary.org/home/index.aspx?id=33502
11. Frederick County: http://www.fcpl.org/information/programs/2009/src-events.php
12. Harford County: http://www.hcplonline.info/kids/summerreading.html
13. Howard County: http://www.hclibrary.org/index.php?page=218
14. Kent County: http://www.kentcountylibrary.org/newsletter/2009/06/summer_reading_your_library_20.html
15. Montgomery County: http://montgomerycountymd.libguides.com/summerreading
16. Prince George’s County: http://www.pgcmls.info/Current/SRP.html
17. Queen Anne’s County: http://www.quan.lib.md.us/
18. Ruth Enlow Library of Garrett County: http://www.relib.net/events.asp
19. Somerset County: http://www.some.lib.md.us/scls-children2.shtml
20. St. Mary’s County: http://www.stmalib.org/summer09.html
21. Talbot County: http://www.tcfl.org/child/summer_reading_2009.html
22. Washington County: http://www.washcolibrary.org/src.asp
23. Wicomico County: http://www.wicomicolibrary.org/
24. Worchester County: http://www.worcesterlibrary.org/

2. For getting around: Need to know the best gas prices around you? GasBuddy offers an easy way to check Maryland:
   
   

http://gasbuddy.com/Gas_Prices/Maryland/index.aspx

For outside Maryland, you can see the state listing on GasBuddy’s home page:

http://gasbuddy.com/

Prices can suddenly change, but these indicators can sometimes be helpful.

If you are already out and about, you may want to check for gas stations and their prices using your mobile. The helpful site “Mashable, The Social Media Guide” offers suggestions (from last year):

http://mashable.com/2008/05/05/check-gas-prices-online-11-handy-tools/

3. Maryland’s official tourism site offers a listing of events, ideas, and a bonus! You can order up to nine brochures/maps/guides for free:
   
   http://visitmaryland.org/Pages/brochures.aspx
   

4. At the Beach is a nice site listing events at major Maryland and Delaware beaches:
   
   http://atbeach.com/events/new/
   
   Click on the event’s name for details. Most listed are free.
   
   
5. Free Music Events in the Maryland/DC region: About.com offers a resource list for finding outdoor, free concerts:
   
   http://dc.about.com/od/concerts/a/summerconcerts.htm
   
   

For Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, you can see a list of free outdoor concerts here:

http://baltimore.about.com/od/artsentertainment/a/outdoorconcerts.htm

More Baltimore-area events (mostly free) are listed on the “Top of the World” at:

http://www.baltimore.to/TopOfWorld/index.html

This is from the tourist/informative site all about Baltimore at:

http://www.baltimore.to/index.html

If you have other questions about what to do this summer and how to get there, remember that you can always log onto Maryland AskUsNow! (http://www.askusnow.info) and chat with a live librarian, anytime day or night.

Have a fun adventure!

Maryland AskUsNow! shows up at events!

Online and in our Communities

During the busy spring months Maryland AskUsNow! is presented at workshops and community events. Julie has been on the road bringing her expertise and presence to conferences, such as REFolution (Lyrasis) and New Jersey Library Association's 2009 conference, both in April. We've also hit the road to bring AskUsNow! to Maryland Day and TowsonTown.

Maryland Day is an annual event that brings thousands of people to the University of Maryland's College Park campus for a full Saturday of demonstrations and interactive exhibits. AskUsNow! shared a library tent with library staff from Prince George's County Public Library and the University of Maryland's libraries. The volunteers worked with Cathay through the heat and hussle to present the statewide service, hand out about 1,000 bags and bookmarks. It was a lively and enjoyable event!

TowsonTown Spring Festival is a weekend long fair close to Maryland AskUsNow!'s home base. AskUsNow! handed out highlighters and pencils - all in the continuous flow of getting the word out about Maryland AskUsNow! and library services.

Coming up: The 2009 Maryland Library Association's Annual Conference!

National Library Week 2009!

National Library Week is here!

This year’s theme is “Worlds connect @ your library.” All types of libraries participate in this annual celebration (school, public, academic and special). While I was reviewing this year’s theme, I began to realize how we are actively and effectively participating. Let me explain:

This year, the National Library Week’s spokesperson is Jamie Lee Curtis. The promotional image (PDF format) shows a postcard with a brief note to all: “The library is where I connect. Connect with your world this week @ your library!” Ms. Curtis is smiling (her “I know something good” grin), seated on a library carpeted floor, with a computer on a work-desk and book stacks behind her.

The mix of technology and library bound books and the casual yet “let’s get to work” attitude speaks to every librarian. We are creating places that actively extend far beyond the bricks and mortar, glass and metal of our buildings, reaching our communities in their homes and wherever they may be. I imagine I can be a patron on a yacht sailing the Caribbean, hiking the Himalayas, traveling to study abroad. We all know “books can take us places.” We are now in a time when we can connect with our patrons in those places. Librarians and patrons have adapted tools to help keep us all connected in a mobile environment.

The other side of this is something I’ve seen on occasion in my current position –that is, connecting with customers outside our tax-paying patron base. Primarily for those of us who work on Maryland AskUsNow! on a global hour, we see questions from all over the United States (not everywhere, but many places). Once in a while we have questions from people outside Maryland, even outside the U.S. During my short time in this position with AskUsNow! I have even worked with a patron as far away as Costa Rica.

Although this is rare, it is a good reminder to me that our library services are reaching beyond walls and boundaries. It is encouraging to see the successful application of various technologies and incredible resources to help our patrons connect with information they need, whether they are within our buildings or home, even far from home at a business conference or on an exotic adventure.

You can celebrate National Library Week this year by participating in your library’s events. Many libraries are promoting the Week in some way, calling notice to our nation’s librarians, facilities and their services. Tuesday, April 14^th is focused upon recognizing our library workers:

http://www.ala-apa.org/about/nlwd.html

For American Library Association’s events and for more information, please view ALA’s website at:

http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/pio/natlibraryweek/nlw.cfm

Greet your fellow librarian and enjoy the week!

(posted by Cathay Crosby, Operations Assistant, Maryland AskUsNow!)

CIL2009: links, thoughts, and presos of note

Earlier this week, i went to the 24th annual Computers in Libraries conference with the intention of absorbing as much information as possible and networking my voice raw. Mission accomplished:

==Websites / webtools to check out==
This list is the best (in my opinion) from Aaron Schmidt's "Best of the Web, Steven M. Cohen's "What's Hot in RSS," and the 40+ cool tools for webmasters presos:

Information Resources

• search.twitter.com - search the knowledge of the people, the hive mind
• YouTube's EDU channel (great for searching, too!)
• A "youtube" for PDF docs

Legal Information Resources

• Washington Post's Votes Database
• Feed for bills, issues, committees, etc
• Federal Disctrict Court filings and docets
• Documents that lawyers put up on the Web

Cool Web Tools

• SendUIt - temporary doc storage for our customers who need stuff and dont have (or want to give us their emails)
• Awesome Highlighter lets you highlight text on web pages and then gives you a small link to the highlighted page. Great for getting someone to pay attention to something specific instead of saying, "go to this url, go halfway down the page, check out the 2nd paragraph..."
• Backup URLCreates a cached copy of a URL in case it goes down
• Jing - still and video screen capture software (i <3>
  
• Today's Meet - creates a temporary online space where people can meet and chat. huge potential for library customers
• Google Forms - create a web form easily with this tool and copy and paste the code into your own site, and the data goes to a Google Spreadsheet. Aaron has used it to create a quick and easy sign-up form for Summer Reading. We used it to capture the stories for our Story Campaign.
• http://www.mindmeister.com Online collaborative mind mapping
  

Webtools for Webmasters

• Layouts for websites/blogs
• web accessibility eval tool
  
• http://www.lovelycharts.com - make charts, easy
  

Analytics

• http://fusestats.com/
  

Personal/Professional Development

• TED Talks - free access to great thinker's the world over
• Journal Table of Contents service: get a feed of a journal's newest TOC

==Presentations & Notes of note==

Creating a Knowledge Commons
Michael Edson, Director of Web and New Media Strategy at the Smithsonian Institution was the keynote on Wednesday morning. He spoke of creating a commons; the sharing and collaboration of human knowledge and innovation. Check out the Travelin' Librarian for video and ppt slides of Michael's keynote.

Friending Libraries: The newest nodes in people's social networks

Lee Rainie- Director of the PEW internet project.  

Link to slides on slideshare. 

Link to notes on strangelibrarian.org

New Strategies for Digital Natives, Helene Blowers, Digital Strategy Director, Columbus Metropolitan Library. link to slides on slideshare.

25 Ideas for Collaborating in 40 Minutes,  Kathy Dempsey

link to notes on strangelibrarian.org

Webdesign Pitfalls, Jeff Wisniewski

link to notes on strangelibrarian.org

==Also Check Out==

• David Lee King's posts on various CIL2009 sessions
• Sarah Houghton-Jan's notes (and link to her slides) on Social Network Profile Management
• Technorati: cil2009
• twitter conversations marked w/ cil2009
• cil2009 FriendFeed room
• cil2009 on flickr

it's not virtual reference (OR how not to be a robot)

[morphed from original post at the strange librarian]

I love virtual reference. I think it helps change the stereotype of libraries (you know the one) and gives us more value to our customers via additional access points. But i've often debated on what to call it. "Virtual reference" doesn't get at what we do. It doesn't have connotations of "real people" having "conversations" with "real people."

@Cil2009, I heard Michael Whitchurch of Brigham Young University say that calling something "virtual" makes it feel less real. Let’s see:

virtual reality: you can’t touch it.
virtual banana: you can’t eat it.
virtual tourist: you can’t drink the water
virtual reference: we’re robots

wha!?

So if it's not "virtual reference," what is it? Some folks have said "it's all reference." and while i agree, i think there needs to be a special note for VR. It takes some different skills to do well, and not everyone is doing it- those who are should get extra props for giving their customers additional access to their libraries.

But what do we call it? "virtual reference" means nothing to anyone besides librarians (and sometimes not even then). We help people online. We answer questions remotely. HEY! Remote Reference! But we’re still stuck on reference, which, in my opinion is one of those jargony library things that no one understands but librarians. (Nor should they, we should be using language that makes sense to our customers, not expecting them to bend to our wills.)

Remote... Information help? Maybe. It’s a work in progress. But i’m all for not making you guys, our fantastic librarians, not sound like robots. Or our service sound like a search engine.

So we’re not robots. interesting thing about that. I always say the way to not sound like a robot is to have a conversation. Don’t just push information at them. But conveying emotion and interest is hard when all you have is words. But wait, books are full of more emotion than movies are… oh, that’s because you’re filling in the blanks with your imagination… and because a good book tells you what’s going on. Like a librarian should tell their customer what’s going on. instead of "here’s a link to Queen Victoria..." try "Oh that’s great! I think we can find what you’re looking for in xx, i’m going to search that to see what i can find... give me 2 mins, brb." wow, what a difference. conversation. transparency. and no robots in sight.

You've heard me say it a thousand times in training- but what do you all think?