Friday, August 28, 2009

Farm Progress Show 2009

Next week is the 2009 Farm Progress Show (FPS) in Decatur at Progress City just north of the Richland Community College Campus. This will be the fifth FPS where Rolling Prairie and its member libraries have participated. As I write the FPS Committee is busily placing labels in the hundreds of books donated by member libraries. These paperback books will be given away during the three days of the show. What does that label say? “a gift from your Illinois Library.”

Preparing for the FPS is a daunting task. It begins nearly a year before the show and starts with RPLS asking librarians to serve on a planning committee. The committee helps plan the booth, plan fund raising activities to pay for the booth registration, helps organize volunteers to work at the booth, solicit paperback books for giveaway, and numerous other tasks.

Monday, we will be setting up the booth, then Sept. 1, 2, & 3 librarians will greet Farmers, FFA members, Agribusiness folks and kids at the booth. We will have free books, raffles and other giveaways. By late Thursday afternoon, the books will be gone, the booth taken down, packed up and moved back to RPLS. All involved will be exhausted but excited about all the people they will have met and the stories they will tell us about their home library.

Monday, August 24, 2009

Kiki

What is kiki? It is a magazine for girls ages 8 and older. When I look at the magazine I think of girls in grades 4-8th grade. It contains articles on fashion, business, health, girls from other parts of the world and more. The girls in the magazine are real girls, not models. There is no advertizing and it won the Mom’s Choice 2009 Magazine of the Year award.

I often hear librarians say they are looking for a good magazine for preteen or early teenage girls. Well this just might be the magazine for them to look at. There are 4 issues a year for $26 but they are a jam packed 80 pages of good stuff. Want to see sample articles go to their website.

Thursday, August 20, 2009

Science for Libraries

One of the Poster Sessions at ALA was entitled “Educating Einsteins without Evaporating Your Budget”. It is a website that brings together web science resources and a link to a portal where you can save your own favorite sites.
As you know science resources can be expensive. Tracking quality sites on the Internet is time consuming. This resource was part of an LSTA grant and is geared towards New York requirements but there are many resources that teachers and librarians in other parts of the country can benefit from.

If you would like to go to the Science for Libraries site click here.

The creators of the site were Alaina Cauchie, alaina.cauchie@gmail.com and Kelly Sanders, KSanders1214@aol.com. If you have questions email them.

Monday, August 17, 2009

More than a Paycheck: Creative Benefits Packages for Libraries

In tight budget times libraries are looking at ways to provide benefits or a positive work culture environment to attract and maintain quality staff. This session looked at 100 + ideas that libraries might be able to use. Some of the ideas I had heard before and others took a different focus. Some would work for any sized library and some were geared for the larger library.

The program was broken down into areas. The first was Culture and one presenter spoke of a quality of work life survey she had done with the staff. There were nine areas from management, communication, empowerment, etc. This gave them feedback on areas where problems might exist. The first time the survey was done it was used as a baseline for the library. It will be repeated every three years. One caution, be prepared to listen to what staff say and be willing to do something with the information gathered.

Other areas of the program covered Life-Work Balance, Staff Development, Staff Recognition, and Health and Welfare. One suggestion was for when there is a big project, such as migration to a new automation system or moving to a new building that staff be allowed to talk about the process. Celebrate the event but also allow staff to respond to these questions on a white board or flip chart:
  • What I will miss from the old system or building (a mourning response)
  • What am I uncertain about.
  • What I am looking forward too.

Giving leave time to vote, donate blood, or attend school conferences were new ideas that would be easy for a library to institute and help staff to feel more a part of the community. Pat Conley Director at Washington County (MN) Library talked about a program she tried once and will try again. It was a way for staff to rotate between locations.

If you would like to see the handouts click here, once at the page scroll down to the title More than a Paycheck on Sunday at 3:30 PM.

Friday, August 14, 2009

Harlequin Publishers

Harlequin Publishers announced the launch of a website for librarians at the 2009 ALA conference. We are familiar with all the romance series that they produce but they have other lines as well. There are action, historical, nonfiction and a new just begun Harlequin Teen.

While this is not the first choice of reading material for some library customers we owe it to those that do enjoy good escape reading to know where to locate it. Check out the library website and the main Harlequin site. There are many things to see there.

Monday, August 10, 2009

Library Security and Safety

Saturday, July 11 at 10:30 PLA sponsored a session titled “Effective Safety and Security Practices in Today’s Public Library.” This was a large room and it was standing room only. Handouts were gobbled up quickly; thank goodness ALA and all of its divisions have put them up on the webpage.

Bryan Oliver, Safety & Security Manager, Richland County (S.C.) Public Library had these points when dealing with disruptive behavior:
  1. Remain calm, be confident, speak in a relaxed tone, pause , Breath, and think before responding.
  2. Listen carefully to the Patron’s question or complaint then used active listening to paraphrase the Patrons concern as precisely as possible.
  3. Do not debate, Do not negotiate and Deviation from policy should be avoided. Be consistent in your responses.
  4. Don’t fight, walk away if a patron displays anger or request assistance from other staff.
  5. If justifiable, make an exception if you have the authority
  6. If exception can not be made, explain the policy or Code of Conduct clearly. The Code of Conduct is your SHIELD!
Take these steps when confronted with disruptive behavior. If the situation warrants, you may ask the Patron to leave. If they do not and the incident escalates, call a supervisor, security, or the police to escort the patron from the premises. The last step is to let other staff members know who was ejected and why. They may wait and try to return.

Andrew Sanderbeck, Consultant & Trainer, The People-Connect Institute had this to say during the presentation—
  • Ensure equitable treatment for all patrons.
  • Deal with problems as they happen, so that the problem does not escalate.
  • Ask yourself are the library policies supportive of the staff and what authority do they have. Look at a behavior intellectually and not emotionally.
  • E + R = O this translates to Events + Response = Outcome When there is an incident, how your respond will determine the outcome. Will a patron have a positive or negative view of the library?
This is a topic of interest to all. Violence seems to be on the increase partly due to the stress of the current economy. The full house at this presentation testifies to the interest and importance of this topic.

Thursday, August 6, 2009

Academic Integrity

Helping students at all levels to understand the importance of doing their own work on projects is a topic of ongoing discussion between faculty and librarians. Attempting to stamp out plagiarism through narrowly focuses presentations has not seemed to work. In the ALA poster sessions I visited with a librarian from Miami University in Oxford Ohio who developed a tutorial to address this issue. The impetus was a faculty study of the issue of academic integrity at the University and their recommended to establish an online tutorial to reach out to first year students.

The result was the establishment of Miami eScholar whose components include:
  • A series of readings divided into five modules
  • Self-check exercises in each module to help students gauge comprehension
  • A final quiz consisting of 19 questions
  • An option to print a certificate of successful completion for students who answer at least 15 or the 18 questions successfully.
eScholar addresses all aspects of creating high-quality research and not just plagiarism. The concepts covered are:
  1. defining information needs
  2. finding, and evaluating resources
  3. citing and ethical use of information
Miami eScholar was implemented in two of their six academic divisions. 97% of students completing the tutorial were able to answer 15 of the 18 questions on the final quiz successfully. Over two/thirds of the students answered one to three of the questions incorrectly indicating that the content presented in eScholar is not second nature to them.

The two year pilot of eScholar had successes and challenges. Feedback from the pilot period has been integrated into revisions that will be available Fall Semester, 2009 plus a new video-based version.

For more information on this program contact Eric Resnis resnisew@muohio.edu, Kwabena Sekyere sekyerk@muohio.edu, or Rob Withers witherre@muohio.edu.