DIY Archives: NEA Spring 2012 Meeting
Posted March 27, 2012 by dunhame
As Danielle kindly mentioned in her last post, she and I recently shared a blog-worthy experience; this past Saturday, we attended the New England Archivists (NEA) Spring 2012 Meeting. Running the risk of blog redundancy, Im going to spend a bit of time writing about my experience at NEA. Luckily, Danielle and I attended some different sessions and got different take-aways from the meeting, so Im thinking this post will be unique after all! The NEA Spring 2012 Meeting was held at Wesleyan University, which makes its home in the quaint city of Middletown, Connecticut. It was really nice to have the opportunity to get out of Boston for a day; I love the city, but getting out to smaller-scale America is something I really appreciate doing from time to time. As a bonus, Wesleyan University is a beautiful campus, and since the weather was somewhere in the realm of This cant be March! we were able to get some time outdoors between sessions. This was my first ever professional conference. It was very exciting…
Library Promotional Considerations
Posted March 26, 2012 by Sarah Barton
New technologies are changing how people use libraries, and libraries must evolve their services and outreach accordingly. Last Wednesday I went to the volunteer kick-off event for the Friends of the Somerville Public Library. The Friends, like many similar organizations representing public libraries across the country, are always looking for new ways to promote their library. So, over the past few days I came up with some fun means of bribery to generate awareness of the library. [Disclaimer: some of these ideas are more feasible than others.] Readers Race Library 5k A road race is not a novel idea (pun intended), but serves as an effective promotional technique. The race starts and ends at the library, and all proceeds benefit the Friends organization. Free books would be available at the finish line, and local businesses could set up booths in the post-race hangout area. Get a Free Library Card Day Ok, so every day is Get a Free Library Card Day, but maybe emphasizing the FREE aspect might help catch peoples attention. Random…
Reflections on the NEA Spring Meeting
Posted March 24, 2012 by Danielle Geller
Lucky for me, I get to beat my fellow blogger, Elise, to posting about the NEA (New England Archivists) Spring Meeting! Though it was actually the first time I had ever met Elise, we and two others carpooled down to Connecticut and shared a hotel room this weekend. If you want to see the response on twitter, check out #neasp2012. And according to NEA, session handouts and presentations should be available on the NEA website soon if you werent able to attend yourself. This spring, I served as a session reporter for Funding Your Archives Project: Money Does Grow on Trees! which featured presentations by Linda L. Carroll, Gwenn Stearn, and Giordana Mecagni, who unfortunately, was unable to attend, though her presentation was given by her colleague Jessica Sedgwick. Ill be making a full report in an upcoming NEA newsletter, but there are some initial reflections I would like to make here. I found Giordana Mecagnis presentation on outreach and advocacy as the best potential fundraising resources the most interesting and relevant to where I…
National Bookmobile Day | Coming Soon
Posted March 22, 2012 by fox32
Brought to you by the American Library Association, the Association of Bookmobile and Outreach Service, and the Association of Rural and Small Libraries comes the (third?) annual National Bookmobile Day -April 11, 2010. Bookmobiles are currently one of the most expensive services of many public libraries so inevitably the first to be chopped when budgets are cut. Just a plain old fact there… and a mobile library may be slightly anachronistic for some, i.e. those that have the internets… My 2cents; bookmobiles fulfill several needs and beyond that are a fantastic visual reminder of the mission of a library -to connect people to information. Vintage photos below via the flickr of the Harris Country Public Library, TX.
Time Management?
Posted March 21, 2012 by Julie Steenson
In thinking of what to write this week, all I could say is I am swamped. I know we eat and sleep more than med students, but maybe not this week! This is a week where some of the time management skills I have preached to my daughter could come in handy. Please forgive the brief entry and enjoy this funny video of why Library School Hurts So Good! I couldnt stop laughing when I saw it, and hopefully, it will ease some of your stress, too. I really love Library School! Library School: Hurts So Good by: fiver615
Embracing Technology
Posted March 20, 2012 by dunhame
On the first day of my Introduction to Archives class, my professor made certain to emphasize the fact that, while the archival field certainly involves a great deal of work with old stuff, its also very much concerned with and immersed in the realm of new stuff, that is, technology. Archivists relationship with technology is twofold: they are tasked with preserving and making available information stored on machine-dependent materials (e.g., floppy disks, VHS tapes, the Internet) and with using technology to make their collections as accessible as possible (putting them online, making them searchable, etc.). I have not had the opportunity to do a great deal of work with digital preservation yet, but Im excited to take Archiving and Preserving Digital Media later on in the GSLIS program. I have, however, had the opportunity to learn about the other side of technology in archives in a course Im taking this semester called Archival Access and Use. One of the main purposes of this course is to teach students the archival description standards and practices currently…
Best. March. Ever.
Posted March 19, 2012 by Sarah Barton
During mid- to late-March you can find me parked in front of a television watching college basketball. I can unabashedly say that I have spent at least 24 of the past 96 hours either actively or passively watching college basketball, but that is about to change. Over the next few weeks, I will supplement my basketball watching with an array of library-related talks and panels. This could be the best March ever! It all starts this afternoon at Simmons with a talk called Developing Diverse Library Leadership in the 21st Century to be given by Molly Raphael, President of the American Libraries Association AND Simmons GSLIS alum. (If that doesnt go to show how far a Simmons GSLIS degree can take you, I dont know what will.) Then, as James posted a couple weeks ago, Wednesday is a kick-off meeting for the Friends of the Somerville Public Library, and I am definitely going to check that out. On Friday, I am going to MIT for a Panel Discussion on Libraries and Best Practices in Fair…
The Suburbs
Posted March 17, 2012 by Danielle Geller
One of the benefits of going to school in a city like Boston is that, aside from everything youll be doing in school, the city itself has plenty to offer. I completed my undergraduate school at a tiny university in central PennsylvaniaShippensburg University, to be exact. And even though I loved the school, the faculty, and my experience there, the best thing the town had to offer were fields of corn and cows. Sure, my friends and I frequently made trips to D.C., Baltimore, and Philadelphia to see shows, etc., but that usually meant at least a 1 1/2 to 2 hour commute one way. Boston is much more expensive than middle-of-nowhere Pennsylvania (my roommates and I shared an apartment and only paid $125 a month each in PA), but its justifiable in the end. In a few weeks, PAX (a huge video game convention) will be coming to Boston. Ive already registered and am totally looking forward to it! Sometimes I do find myself missing green things and a little bit of nature, but…
Spring is here…sort of
Posted March 16, 2012 by Maya Bery
Forgive the tangent from more scholarly, library-centric posts, but I would be remiss in my duties as a blogger for the Admissions Office if I did not comment upon the weather in Boston. You see, before I moved to Boston, I knew that it got a lot of snow. This seemed self-evident – we are, after all, living in New England. What I didn’t know is that Boston is very much a “four seasons in a day” kind of place, though usually the changes are spread over the course of one day to the next. Take this past week, for example. Last weekend brought with it the time change, clocks going forward an hour, giving us extra daylight at the day’s end. This is a welcome change even if it does result in lost sleep because it means instead of getting dark at 5:30 (now – in the depths of winter, it’s pitch black by 5:00), it’s now dusk until somewhere around 6:30. The beginning of the week brought the most extraordinarily gorgeous weather, the…
Kentucky pack-horse librarians
Posted March 15, 2012 by fox32
Converted bakery trucks are fine, a restored International Harverster Metro would be neat, but how about Appalachian mountain riders as your bookmobile service? As a feature of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) of the 1930’s that was the case. Thousands of people lived in the crooks and hollows of Kentucky’s mountains. Without newspapers, telephones, or radios, they were almost totally isolated from the outside world. Since there were not paved or even gravel roads, the only way in was by foot, horse, or mule. People followed creek beds and mountain paths to their tiny communities and homes in the hollows. Small one-room schoolhouses nestled in coves and mining camps were almost entirely removed from the outside world. These schools barely had enough textbooks for their students. Some had no books at all. In face of the daunting essential needs, food, clothing, medicine, employment, funding for libraries seemed a very low priority. Without enough money to feed their bodies, how in the world could money be found to “feed their minds?” asked First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt….