Beth Gallaway, aka Information Goddess, shared her recent presentation on Board Gaming and the AASL Standards on SlideShare. See her blog post for links to her handouts for these sessions. Sounds like it was a fun session.
Beth is also teaching an online course in February: Get Your Game On, Online! That sounds like fun too!
New York State’s School Library Systems are taking quite a financial hit in the current economic crisis. There will be cuts to many of the important support and training services they provide to school library media centers throughout the state.
I received this from Linda Fox of the Capital Region BOCES SLS today:
The Capital Region BOCES School Library System joins all other SLS’s in the state in concern about the state’s fiscal crisis. At this writing, funding for systems is at a standstill. Part of the funding has been received, but there is no indication that the remainder of the approved funding will arrive any time soon. This has a direct impact on staffing and programs. (more…)
Great presentation from the TED Talks.
Tim Brown: The powerful link between creativity and play
Talked about the need to engage in:
The route for all my errands today was planned around a trip to the library in a neighboring town. They had the book I really wanted. You know how it is, you finish a good mystery and find that what you thought were 20 more pages of that mystery are actually the first 20 pages of the next one. Ok, I wanted it and wanted it today.
Checked the online catalog, one copy was supposed to be on the ‘shelving cart’. When I got to the library, I dutifully checked the shelves in case it had been shelved. Not there. On to the circ desk to ask for help. And even though I’m a librarian, I still get nervous when I have to ask for help. I’m afraid someone will be cranky with me. That’s not at all fair I know, must be the result of some long forgotten bad library experience.
Enter nice library lady. She checked the shelving carts in the back room. She came out to double check where I’d looked and other places that it might have been mis-shelved. But no luck, not to be found. She kindly offered to place a hold on it, which I turned down, secretly planning to head for Borders to get it. This was truly great customer service and even though I didn’t have the book, I was happy with the experience.
Moments later, while I was looking for some other stuff, over came nice library lady with a big smile and THE book! She knew it had to be somewhere and wasn’t going to give up.
Thank you Colonie Library for a great customer service experience (and for the cookies at the checkout counter!)
In case you haven’t heard, texting is kind of popular. 
Personally, it looks like I would fall into the over 65 crowd, but I think my texting age will go down if I ever get a smarter phone. But look at those numbers for those in their teens & 20′s. Is there any doubt how they communicate?
So, how is your library keeping up with this? Does your library provide easy access to information via mobile devices? Does your web site work on a mobile device? Do you provide IM reference? Can your catalog text you with information about library materials? Or are you missing out on new ways to communicate?
And if you think that texting is going to go away, check out the more than 400% increase in just 2 years! Yikes. Bring on that smart phone. And more agile thumbs.
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updated 11/11/08 – images got mixed up. fixed.
Our lunch break today was too short to get any game playing going – school librarians know how to eat quick and network at the same time! But I did get a few games out for people to look at. In honor of ALA’s National Gaming Day coming up on Nov 15, we had Pictureka and Top Trumps. And Quiddler too. All these are new to me, so I was happy to have an excuse to buy them.
But what I really loved about this, was the reaction of a couple of the librarians who started thinking about how they could use the ideas behind these games and have kids create their own games! Kids could make their own Top Trumps cards by using a big huge labs Trading Card making tool. Use a photo from flickr, add some facts, print them out and play! Cool! Pictureka-ish game boards could be created with clip art collections. All themed around topics being covered in classes. Creative and fun.
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