Category: Libraries

I thought you all might be interested in a new blog post by Bobbi Newman. Some of you might be familiar with Bobbi; she is now the digital branch manager at the Chattahoochee Valley Regional Library System. Bobbi will be speaking at the KLA Conference on Thursday, April 8, at 10am-11:30am as the Beta Phi Mu speaker, presenting on Libraries and Transliteracy.

Bobbi blogged this morning about a recent staff day at her library where Buffy Hamilton (who will be speaking at the ESU SLIM Summer Institute for School Librarians) spoke about 9 pivot points of change in libraries. I’m going to post the first five here; many of them fit in very neatly with what we’ve been covering so far in 23 Things Kansas and will be covering in the weeks to come. Check out Bobbi’s blog for the other points as well as the slides from Buffy’s presentation.

The fabulous Buffy Hamilton gave her Pivot Points of Change presentation at my library’s Staff Day last week. The points were inspired by post from Seth Godin in which he states changing everything is too difficult. Buffy applied this to libraries and librarians for the 9 pivot points of change. This is a slightly modified version of her original 9 pivot points of change for school librarians.

1. Instead of thinking you can only participate in face to face conferences, consider how you can participate virtually
2. Keep your traditional means of connecting with patrons and colleagues, but innovate at every possible touch point through social media and social networking
3. Keep reading your print journals, but use a feed aggregator or information portal to access and organize your favorite blogs, journals, podcasts, youtube videos, and twitter rss feeds to stay on the cutting edge
4. Keep networking with colleagues face to face, but cultivate a personal learning network to broaden your PLN (Personal Learning Network) to include librarians and other professionals from around the world who can inform your thinking, practice, and philosophy
5. Keep your traditional productivity tools, but use cloud computing to encourage collaboration and information sharing

For those 23 Things Kansas participants who started using Twitter last week, I hope you remember to check in from time to time and keep the conversation going there, and find new resources. I try to remember to cross-post good articles and links I come across to my Delicious account, but I’m pretty forgetful. I usually just end tweeting these articles.

Please let me know if you still have questions about Twitter or about how it might work for you. The pivot point of change #4 mentioned above is a huge reason why I use Twitter so much in my daily professional life. The people I communicate with around the country (librarians and educators) shape my thinking and the tools that I use on a regular basis.

Also, coming up in April, even if you won’t be able to attend the KLA conference in Wichita, you’ll be able to follow from home, through the Twitter hashtag that will be used to track everyone’s tweets relating to the conference. I believe that hashtag will be #kla2010. I’ll post more information about how to do this in the coming weeks.