2011 was a good year, a year of new beginnings, a LOT of traveling and one happy family surprise. I officially moved to St. Louis, MO in January, did a lot of traveling this year, made some progress toward my MLIS degree and networked with TONS of aspiring and practicing librarians at various conferences and events around the country.

Conferences Attended:

• ARL Leadership Symposium – January (San Diego, CA)
• ALA Midwinter – January (San Diego, CA)
• ACRL Conference – April (Philadelphia, PA)
• ALA Annual – June (New Orleans, LA)

Courses Completed:

• Planning, Marketing and Assessing Library Services (Spring 2011)
• Special Libraries (Summer 2011 — taken at University of Missouri at Columbia)

Professional Development:

• Joined the Missouri Library Association
• Renewed my BCALA and ALA memberships
• Renewed my SLA membership and joined the local chapter
• Assigned and met with two new mentors (one through ARL and the other through ACRL)

I fully intended to take courses and attend more conferences in the fall, however I didn’t do so because of the arrival of this little cutie in October:

Needless to say, I had my hands full most of the fall and winter and ended up pushing back my graduation date an entire semester. Instead of finishing in May 2012, I will finish my MLIS in December 2012. My move means that I will have to network and seek out new local sites for my required internship, but pushing back the graduation date gives me time to meet and network with local St. Louis librarians. I got a head start on that by meeting MLA members at ALA Annual, but I will make it a priority to attend SLA-STL meetings and events in 2012.

Here’s to a great 2011 and an even better 2012!

What a week! I’ve just returned home from the biennial ACRL conference in Philadelphia.

In addition to being the ACRL Spectrum Scholar, I also had the honor of being selected for the ACRL Presidential Scholarship. The four past, present, and future ACRL presidents combined funds in order to create this award. So I’m very thankful to Lisa Hinchliffe, Joyce Ogburn, Lori Goetsch and Ericka Linke for their support. I never would have been able to attend without their financial assistance.

I had an absolute blast in Philadelphia. Not only did I get to see some old colleagues and professors, I got to meet and connect with mandy new academic librarians, especially those from my new hometown of St. Louis.

Some of the highlights from my trip:

• First Time Attendees Orientation — a must attend. The second half of the session consisted a mini-fair with all of the sections and roundtables in attendance. Great way to find your niche within ACRL and be exposed to new ones. As a result of this fair, I became more interested in the work of the Residency Interest Group.
• A panel discussion and presentation on the newly releasaed Value of Academic Libraries report that included ACRL’s President, Executive Director, and one of my professors, Dr. Megan Oakleaf.
• Personal Branding for New Librarians: Standing out and Stepping Up presented by Kiyomi Deards, Erin Dorney, and Bohyun Kim (virtual).
• ACRL 2011 Poster Session
• ACRL 2011 Exhibits
• Staying Genuine And Creating Connections: Networking And Involvement For Introverts facilitated by Kiyomi Deards (roundtable session)
• Book release of Atlas of New Librarianship by R. David Lankes , another one of my professors.
• Authentic Philly cheesesteaks (not library-related but still important!)

All in all, I truly enjoyed myself in Philadelphia and am planning to attend the next conference in Indianapolis, IN in 2013!

2010 was a good year — a year of many changes and more new beginnings.

I applied and was admitted to Syracuse University’s MLIS program and began my studies there in July with an on campus residency. I have absolutely no complaints about the Wayne State program — it was simply that the Syracuse program was a better for me and my interests in some of the more techie aspects of librarianship. I have not regretted that decision at all.

I was successful in reaching my goal of helping with the costs of education by becoming both the ACRL Spectrum Scholar and a Diversity Scholar. Not only will the funds help me out in keeping grad school costs down, I get to meet and network with the movers and shakers of the library professions and attend at least two conferences — one in San Diego and the other in New Orleans!

So here it is. I’ve only managed to attend one library conference this year becuase my family and I ended up moving twice in one year. However, I did successfully complete my first two semesters of study at Syracuse. I look forward to 2011, staying put in one place and attending even more conferences.

Conferences Attended:

• ALA Midwinter — January (Boston, MA)

Courses Completed:

• Information and Information Environments
• Introduction to the Library and Information Profession
• Digital Libraries
• Reference and Information Literacy Services
• Survey of Telecommunications and Information Policy

Happy New Year to all and may 2011 be the year your dreams come true!

(note: This post is my submission for the Syracuse University iSchool “Librarianship into the Future” award)

Hi, I’m JaTara. I’m a wife and mother living near Hartford, CT. However, I was born and raised in Louisiana. I have several degrees in computer science and mathematics and worked as a software engineer for several years. However, I realized that while I love working with computers, what excited me even more is helping people use technology in a way that made sense to them (taking the “eek” out of geek-speak). Consequently, I decided to pursue a MLIS degree with the goal of being an emerging technologies librarian or a systems librarian.

I currently volunteer at the Fletcher Memorial Library in Hampton, CT and work as a Library Service Assistant at the Yale University Library in New Haven, CT. I love both of my jobs and look forward to learning something new every day. Serving two different types of patrons help ensure that my days are NEVER boring. One day, I may be shelving books around a canine patron in Hampton and the next, I’m handling materials from 1915 in New Haven. I love it all.

I’m a member of the ALA (New Members Round Table), New England Library Association, Connecticut Library Association, and the Black Caucus of the American Library Association-CT affiliate. I currently don’t hold a committee appointment, but have served as a conference blogger for the NELA conference last year (here is my recap complete with links to the conference blog) and plan to blog at other conferences in the future.

Currently, I’m a HUGE social media fan. I have accounts on myspace, facebook, and LinkedIn. As a rather shy person, I love that I can instantly connect with people online and start exchanging ideas or get a pulse on what the “hot” topic of the day is. I’m also interested in the “geeky” side of social media. I’ve served as a virtual intern with Keppie Careers. As part of my duties, I set up the Career Collective blog using WordPress with a modified theme and several plugins. Even though I don’t contribute any content to that site, I do advise the blog owners about interesting technological solutions that can help them be more efficient in their work.

I want to be a part of helping libraries get the most out of social media. I see too many library blogs, facebook fan pages and twitter feeds with little to no content on them. The sad thing is that many of these libraries have interesting content hidden away in their monthly (paper) newsletters that are perfectly appropriate to share via social media technology.

I think this is due to a combination of two factors:
a) not understanding how social media can help their libraries
b) a perception that it would take “too much time” to update all the various sites on a regular basis

I’ll start with the easiest to address – b) “too much time.” The fun thing about social media is that it really doesn’t have to take that much time — there are numerous APIs out there that let the major social media sites connect and share content with each other. For example, if you post the blog’s RSS feed into your facebook fan page, every new blog post will automatically show up as a new note on your facebook fan page (and is visible from the wall). We all send/recieve email everyday — WordPress will let you update your blog via email — no need to log into a different site. I think that in addition to sharing with libraries the benefit of social media, we should also share ways to make it easy to incorporate this technology in their workflow.

As for a), I believe that Syracuse can lead by example. If we can present successful, tangible examples of how social media works, then I believe that libraries may be encouraged to follow suit.

I want to be a part of this effort and if selected for this award, I know I would do a great job for you. Thank you for your consideration.

Goals for 2010

2009 was a great year — I took a daydream of becoming a librarian and took active steps to make it a reality. Library school, library conferences, library volunteerism.

My goals for 2010 are pretty straightforward — keep doing what I’ve been doing (going to library school, attend local and national library conferences, and continue to gain library experience by working in the local libraries in my area).

In addition, I plan to be more active in my local library associations and ALA by joining at least one committee in each organization and continuing to network with other members. I’m also debating joining one of the following: SLA, ASIS&T, or ACRL. I’m interested in academic libraries, but also special libraries as well. Decisions, decisions, decisions.

I still want to have my MLIS 100% funded, so I’m continuing to seek out scholarships, fellowships, and other sources of funding. Ideally, I’d like to be able to not use student loans at all. I’m applying for several scholarships this year and am applying to a few library schools with generous scholarship packages to see what I can get.

Here’s to a even better 2010!

What a year!

What a difference twelve months makes. At this time last year, I was still employed as a software engineer at my previous company. I enjoyed it, but it wasn’t a good fit for me. Less than two months later, I would be unemployed with plenty of time to figure out my next steps.

To date:

- I’ve started graduate school at Wayne State University.
- I attended two library conferences: the Connecticut Library Association conference and the New England Library Association conference. I also live-blogged portions of the NELA conference.
- I applied for at least ten pre-professional library positions, interviewed at three of them and ultimately accepted a position with the third one. Whoohoo!
- I have been volunteering at a rural public library for the last six months.
- I’ve entered the E. J. Josey Award competition by modifying an old class assignment.
- I requested to serve on one of the ALA committees (I also requested to serve on a NMRT committee as well, but decided to hold off for the time being).

2009 has truly been a challenging year. I struggled with the decision to pursue my librarian dreams, especially in light of being unemployed during a recession and really feeling that I should do the “right” thing and take another software engineering job to support my family. I’m glad that I decided to follow my dreams just this once. I’ve met some wonderful librarians who are working on things that I’m interested in and I’m getting more and more excited about the prospect of working in a library full-time some day.

I’m looking forward to seeing what 2010 has in store for me.

EBSCO offers five scholarships to attend 2010 ALA Midwinter Meeting

CHICAGO – The American Library Association (ALA) and EBSCO are partnering to offer five scholarships for librarians to attend the 2010 ALA Midwinter Meeting in Boston. The meeting takes place Jan. 15-19, 2010, and offers an opportunity for continuing education, meetings and interaction with colleagues.
Each EBSCO scholarship will be in the amount of $1,500, and one of the five scholarships will be awarded to a first-time conference attendee. The scholarship money is to be used for conference registration, travel and expenses.

Deadline for entry is Nov. 23, 2009, and the application information can be found at: www.ala.org/ala/awardsgrants/awardsrecords/ebscosponsorship/ebscosponsorship.cfm.

Scholarship recipients will be notified no later than Dec. 15, 2009.

To apply, candidates must complete the application criteria and submit an essay that answers the following question: “What do you believe to be the biggest challenge in managing electronic resources in libraries today, and what solutions do you envision?” Essays and applications will be judged by a jury designated by ALA.

About EBSCO
EBSCO is the world’s premier full-service provider of information, offering a portfolio of services that spans the realm of print and electronic subscription access and management, research databases and more. The company’s e-resource renewal and management tools help librarians accomplish in hours what once took weeks. For more information, please visit www.ebsco.com.

Last night, I spent a good hour looking working on my committee volunteer requests (The ALA President-Elect is accepting requests until 12/4). Only five minutes of that was spent actually filling in the form, the remaining 55 was spent visiting the ALA website and surfing the bewildering number of ALA committees (21) and council committees (16) — here’s the full list. If that wasn’t intimidating enough, almost every division and roundtable has its own set of committees (and subcommittees) as well. I’m leaving the math on that as an exercise for the reader.

Happily (?), I only needed to select from the list of ALA committees and council committees. After reading over everything (hint to ALA: it sure would be nice to have a brief summary of all the committees on one webpage — clicking 36 separate links was not a fun task) , I decided to request the Web Site Advisory Committee and the Training, Orientation & Leadership Development Committee. My technical background would be useful on the Web Site Advisory committee, plus I have a few annoyances with regards to the website that I’d like addressed such as speed on certain webpages (getting ketchup out of a bottle is faster) and with broken links.

Because I’m a glutton for punishment, I also requested to serve on the NMRT Midwinter Social committee for 2010-2011 as well. Oy.

In spite of all this, I’m looking forward to learning more about the inner workings of ALA and working with some interesting people doing interesting things. This should be interesting.

As a career changer, I’m always on the lookout for current information about libraries. When I heard about American Libraries Direct (AL Direct), I immediately subscribed to it and was awed by the amount and quality of information I received. I enjoy reading short blurbs about what libraries across the country are doing and the innovative trends within our profession.

It’s intended to be a publicity vehicle for ALA, but it has some really good information.

Here’s a link to the most recent issue of AL Direct and another link to sign up for issues to be delivered to your email inbox. Subscribing to AL Direct is FREE and it’s well worth the time to read it.

Disclaimer: Even though this post may seem like an advertisement, I’m not affiliated with this in any way. I just highly recommend it.

I just spent the past few days in Hartford, CT attending the New England Library Association Annual Conference. This was my first time attending and I really enjoyed myself. Besides attending sessions and meeting with people, I served as a guest blogger on the conference blog (my posts are here, here, here, and here).

This was my second library-related conference, although it was my first NELA conference.  I attended a few interesting sessions such as Introduction to Evolutionary Feng Shui and  Looking Good on a Budget: Principles of Design for the Artistically Challenged (low-cost ways to design attractive brochures and flyers) and programs such as the Drop-In Resume Review (for getting sound resume advice from hiring managers) and the gaming room (where attendees can play video games (i.e. Guitar Hero)  on a variety of consoles and discuss their use in libraries). As a video game fan, my favorite part of the conference was without a doubt the gaming room. I must have spent a good 45 minutes there trying to get the rhythm to play “Rock Band” properly. At least I know what I want for Christmas this year.

I also had a chance to do some networking. The Syracuse University iSchool was at the exhibit fair and I enjoyed talking with the staff manning the booth. They invited to me to an alumni networking event at the local watering hole and I had a great time meeting some of the local alumni. I’m seriously leaning towards putting in an application as a transfer student for Fall 2010. Even though I truly enjoy Wayne State‘s program, money is a concern for me, so I’m still keeping my eyes open for scholarships and Syracuse has some very generous ones. Ideally, I’d like to have my entire LIS education paid for without having to take out loans, but we’ll see. I also got to meet some other interesting folks who encouraged me to apply for the prestigious Spectrum Scholarship program, so that’s another thing for my to-do list.

Overall, the conference was well-organized with a variety of activities for just about anybody (presentations, panel discussions, banquets, impromptu networking events with refreshments). I’ll admit that I didn’t take advantage of the networking events like I planned to, but I did get to meet a few new people and solidify existing connections. All in all, I enjoyed myself and had a great time. I’m SO looking forward to my next library conference (ALA Midwinter Conference in Boston, MA).