Andrea’s at CiL and has some tips for presenters that are right on the money. I went to show off one of our library databases at an elementary school yesterday. Everything was fine until we got to the database login page. For some reason IE wouldn’t let us in, the tech guy had gone home, and no one else knew if there was a firewall or virus software on the machine. Fortunately, I had brought all the screenshots of the database that I had used when I was demonstrating it on public access TV. Oddly, the demonstration search I had used for the TV show just happened to be the same as the name of the town I was in. I walked away from that talk looking well-prepared and smart instead of tech-clueless and frustrated. And that IE problem we were having? We switched to Safari as an afterthought when I was on my way out, and we logged in to the database no problem, vexing!
Author: jessamyn
ala elections
ALA Elections are starting this week. I’ve requested a paper ballot again this year just to see how things work for the less technologically adept. The vendor running the elections is distributing all the emails with the login/password combinations for voting [yes, you read that right, passwords in email] over the next week to keep people from reading their email and then going to vote all at once, thus overloading the server, according to email we got on the Council list. Only one candidate has a blog this year, Leslie Burger. You may remember that the candidate without a blog last year was Michael Gorman.
Movers! Shakers! Bloggers! Others!
It’s really great to see the Library Journal Movers and Shakers awards include so many colleagues not just from the blogging world — Aaron and Michael — but other parts of the library world I interact with when I step away from the keyboard, like Veronda Pitchford from Chicago and Kim Charlson from Perkins School for the Blind, a place I rememebr visiting when I was a little girl.
other sorts of library dust
While I was looking up the URL for Library Dust I happened to also co-Google this neat page about Modern Library dust jackets.
what’s the deal with library school enrollment vs. actual JOBS?
Michael McGrorty turns his attention to one of my favorite library topics: the myth of the impending librarian shortage. Worth reading all the way through the comments.
A common complaint among current and former students is that they entered library school with the expectation that jobs would be not merely available, but plentiful. This information did not rise into the consciousness of thousands of people independently, but came for the most part from the schools themselves, and if not, was certainly not contradicted by them. Now, when the market is shrunken, the members of that loose cartel continue to accept students and produce graduates at a pace which ignores the reality of the market—because there has never been a penalty for encouraging the dreams of library students, and because, after all, that is their business.Â