ALA Midwinter Thoughts

Well, I just got done with another day at ALA Midwinter. Here are some highlights:

I attended the CLENE-RT staff development discussion group and they are always so wonderful! I really miss being secretary for that organization so I thought I'd see what they were doing. The conversation was great. They have a blog: cebuzz.wordpress.com which I'll have to check out. They were discussing e-learning and mentioned LE@D and something new that Neal Schuman is doing called the Professional Education Network (PEN) and the person talking about it said it was well worth looking into for online learning. Infopeople.org was also mentioned. I talked a little about using YouTube for communication and mentioned what we're doing in SC with our SCSL and SCLA YouTube Channels and got lots of questions. Someone also mentioned The Flip video recorder. It's only $150 and has a built in USB connection. Check it out at www.theflip.com. I think libraries should get these and record some PR pieces and post to YouTube! It's a great way to promote the library. There is a learning curve when it comes to using things like iMovie and MS Movie Maker but it CAN be done!

Also, today at the Chapter Relations Committee II meeting there was lots of committee business that took place for instance Doug Evans gave an update form the International Council of Library Association Executives, Larra Clark from the ALA Office for Research and Statistics talked about some recent studies that have been published. Also Emily Sheketoff from the ALA Washington Office talked about IMLS and the whole statistics program move and how the ALA WO is trying to make sure that IMLS has enough staff to handle the transition from NCES. It will be quite interesting in the next couple of years to see how this all pans out with IMLS managing the statistics program for public libraries. There was also discussion about CAPWIZ - http://capwiz.com/ala/home/ which is the issues and advocacy section of ALA where you can find lots of legislative updates, etc. I got some neat ilovelibraries.org bookmarks that I will take back to my library :-)

Tomorrow will be my travel day back to Columbia!