Roundtable for New Directors

Are you a new or "new-ish" director? Join us for the first Roundtable for New Directors meeting after the September Director's Association (DA) meeting on Wednesday, September 3rd. This is a group for directors who have been in their position for 3 years or less to give you the opportunity to meet with others dealing with similar situations and to find answers and contacts to help you in your day-to-day life at the library. The meeting includes lunch. Register online: http://calendar.midhudson.org/

MHLS Libraries
As seen in the Phoenicia Times:
“The Friends of the Phoenicia Library is funding Sunday Summer Hours at the Phoenica Library! Come enjoy the New York Sunday Times. Save paper and share camaraderie during our new hours on Sundays 10:00- 3:00pm beginning June 29, to August 31, 2008. See you there! - Michelle Spark, Friends of the Phoenicia Library”

Professional Development
The e-mails you send reflect on both you and your library. Poor grammar and sentence structure make the sender appear uneducated. Casual abbreviations and lack of attention to detail imply that the writer doesn’t care about the message. It is all part of ‘perception marketing’: people receive many e-mails each day from people who are not careful communicators, so attention to this will make people perceive you are more professional and businesslike.
- Choose what you put in the Subject: field carefully. Many people determine if they are even going to open an e-mail by the Subject. Also if it is left blank it may trigger a spam filter and the recipient may not even get the message.
- Use conventional capitalization of your name as it appears automatically in the From: field. Don’t like what appears now? You can change it: In Outlook through Tools, then Account Settings; in G-mail through Settings, then Accounts.
- Include the name of your library in your e-mail address. If you are using a free e-mail like Yahoo or G-mail that doesn’t contain the domain name of your library, consider making the name of your library part of the name before the @ symbol. Staff should not use personal e-mail accounts for library business.
[From Bad E-mail Habits: What Message Are You Sending? a CareerTrack webinar]

Marketing, Advocacy & Funding
From NeuroscienceMarketing.com: “Marketers know there are potent words in advertising, like “Free” and “New.” Neuroscientists have now determined that the appeal of “new” is hard-wired into our brains. Novelty activates our brain’s reward center, which may have been an evolutionary advantage to our ancestors as they encountered new food sources or other elements of survival. Today, we are no longer hunters and gatherers, but the novelty-seeking circuitry is still active and makes us find new products (and even repackaged old products) attractive.

Reference & Collection Development
If a patron who is blind came into your library could they use the Internet on your public access computers? WebAnywhere is a web-based screen reader for the web. It is free and requires no special software to be installed on the client machine and, therefore, enables blind people to access the web from any computer they happen to have access to that has a sound card. WebAnywhere's will run on any machine, even heavily locked-down public terminals, regardless of what operating system it is running and regardless of what browsers are installed. To download or learn more go to http://webanywhere.cs.washington.edu/

Programming
Online Community for Book Clubs: Booksprouts [http://www.booksprouts.com/] is an online community designed specifically to help book clubs organize and communicate the details. Clubs can be open to the public or invitation-only, and you can either select the book for the group to read yourself or let group members nominate a title and then put them up to a vote.”
[As seen on Infodoodads, 7.11.08]

Check out the new resource added to the Teaching Technology section in the Programming area of the MHLS web site for links to the Hennepin County Public Library’s (HCPL) trainer outlines, exercises and tutorials for online skills: [http://midhudson.org/program/computer/main.php]
HCPL Public Learning & Training modules include
· Learn to Mouse and Keyboard
· Intro to Software
· Internet Lab
· Libraries, Computers and Digital Information
· Internet Basics
· Yahoo! Email Basics
· Internet Trends
· Intermediate Yahoo! Email
· Genealogy Resources (includes HeritageQuest)
· Health Information: How to Find it, How to Use it
· Investment Research Using Standard & Poor's NetAdvantage
· Job Searching
· Online Travel and More

New Traveling Exhibit Opportunity: Public libraries are invited to apply to host “Visions of the Universe: Four Centuries of Discovery,” a traveling exhibition developed by the America Library Association (ALA) Public Programs Office in cooperation with the Space Telescope Science Institute Office of Public Outreach and the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, to mark the International Year of Astronomy in 2009. The exhibit will travel to 40 selected public libraries from January 2009 through December 2010. Applications are available at http://www.ala.org/visionsoftheuniverse and must be submitted to ALA by September 19th.

Youth Services
The 2008 SRP Final Report is now available at: http://midhudson.org/program/SRP/main.htm. The form has changed since last year, so you may want to look at the report before too much of the summer goes by. You can print a PDF version of the form directly from the website but, please remember all reports must be submitted through the online form. As always, if you have any questions contact the MHLS Youth Services Department.

“Teen Spirit in the Library: Best Practices for Teen Services” webcast featuring:
· Michele Gorman, teen services coordinator for the Public Library of Charlotte & Mecklenburg County, NC;
· Jen Maney, manager of Pima County Public Library’s Virtual Library (Tuscon, AZ);
· Christine Pearson, Maricopa County Library District’s (AZ) web designer and developer;
· Scott Nicholson, Syracuse University School of Information Studies, NY
available online at http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6570886.html

Trustee Resources
“A library is defined by five things:
The place
The stuff
The support
The interaction
The values
If you take away one of these things, it becomes something other than a library.”
- Joseph Janes, University of Washington and columnist for American Libraries at the 2008 ALA Conference session, “Isn’t it great to be in the library… wherever that is?”

Administration & Management
Excerpt from the Darien Library (CT)’s Library Internet Use Policy: [last line] “The internet is just one source of information. Often the information being sought will be found in library books, periodicals, computerized databases rather than the internet.”

The American Library Association-Allied Professional Association Council passed a living wage resolution for library employees at the American Library Association Annual Conference in Anaheim, Calif. On Monday, June 30, the ALA-APA Standing Committee on the Salaries and Status of Library Workers brought forward a resolution supporting an increase in minimum salary for librarians to $41,680 per year and library workers at $13 an hour. The librarian recommended salary increase is in response to the ALA-APA’s analysis of the All-Urban Consumer Price Index (CPI), the standard measure for inflation of goods and services, which is adjusted monthly to reflect price inflation. The library worker $13 adjustment is in relation to the Federal Poverty Guidelines.

Member Libraries are welcome to submit items of interest and job openings to the MHLS Bulletin: bulletin@midhudson.org. The MHLS Bulletin is available on line at http://midhudson.org/bulletins/main.htm.