Staying connected

We had our School Library Network meeting this week - hosted at Kristin School. These Network meetings are run by National Library advisors and they are so valuable. We share ideas, ask each other for advice and help. These Networks are so valuable. Face to face meetings are still an important part of our Networking along with listservs and other electronic methods.

Web2.0 use - is privacy possible on the web?

There is an interesting document about how Barak Obama's election campaign used web2.0 tools to connect with the voters. In it they describe where people are at in terms of their use and ease with web2.0 tools.

I am a learner but according to the article I am post crawling, into the walking phase and starting to run with web2.0.

I looked at twitter and wondered about it. Having been travelling recently I have been inspired to make more use of Facebook. I am holding back though. I have some real doubts about privacy - my own and that of my friends. To be quite honest I don't want the world looking at my holiday photos or reading what my friends write on my "wall".

Web2.0 tools are now being discussed in professional circles - is it OK to be 'friends' with former students or current students for that matter? Surely if you wouldn't invite them to your place for a meal would you consider having them as a friend? I guess the 3 million friends Barak Obama has would make a busy kitchen for Michelle if that was their standard for accepting friends.

Now that the hockey season is underway I can happily come into work early and blog.

It takes a team to run a library - meet the team

Last Friday we ran our Student Librarian training day. We have 38 wonderful student librarians. The student lead librarians ran their teams through their paces, teaching the new librarians and coming to terms with the changes to our software system. We have a different team every interval and lunchtime throughout the week. The lead librarians run their teams, allocate roles and check the quality of the work completed. We are a busy library and really rely on these wonderful volunteers.

Happy New Year

When is it impolite, redundant, careless or even insulting to wish someone Happy New Year? Is there a social etiquette about this? I think if you haven't seen them since the start of the new year it is still perfectly acceptable but I am open to correction.

Anyway - I know it is almost at the end of February and this is my first post of the new year. What can I say? It has been a BUSY start to the year.

Here is a photo of three of the four of us in the library team in our new library. As you can see there is still some work to do but we are standing where the issues desk will be.

Going on a summer holiday

For those who can afford it Novel Holidays looks very appealing. Not only do they do literature trips but they also propose the kind of holidays that people can then go and write a novel about.

Great fun.

As for me - it will be a summer at home, then at my folks bach at Rangitata - reading books of course while my guys fish for salmon.

Getting Kids to read...

Working on WEb 2.0 for school libraries

It has been my week for inspiration from colleagues. At a School Library Network meeting I met Jill McGregor from Glenfield College. She has just begun a library wiki for her school library. She wants it kept quiet for a while but it looks great. Then when I get to school on Wednesday i find a colleague in Australia wants to work on web 2.0 for school libraries - some training, skills, examples type things.

It is great to look at each other's work, to assist each other learn new technologies and apply them successfully to our libraries.

So what have we got that can be used in school libraires? Let's begin some lists
Wikis are great for collaborative learning
Delicious for classes bookmarking useful sites for research
Blogs for sharing views and information
Flickr for sharing photos
You tube and teacher tube for video

That's just to start off the top of my head. I wonder about trying twitter to track research progress or for staff to log what they are doing over a week to see if you need to increase library staffing.

By the way there are a few changes I want to make to this blog page but I need to spend longer than two minutes to figure out how to do that and at this time of the year.... so when I do I will add the Hub and artichoke