SAPLibro

Here are three of my most-visited blogs:

1. Teen Librarian Toolbox (great overall resource for programming ideas, book reviews, and hot topics)
2. YALSA Blog (YA trends, programming ideas, grant opportunities…you name it!)
3. Swiss Army Librarian (funny library anecdotes that offer great insight as to how our field works on a daily basis)

Each one offers a completely different view of the library world, and I love cycling them through to keep up-to-date with the many aspects of our jobs. Sometimes I’ll find a great program idea, or I’ll read about a patron situation that I never considered having to potentially deal with. Or I’ll even stumble across some fascinating news about YA, like a new book series! Having a well-rounded PLN is essential to how we operate, because there’s just no way we could stay current on all of these things on our own.

For the Encino Branch Library, our nearest McDonald’s is actually within walking distance! Even when I select the Transit option, it still gives me walking directions:

So it would actually be quite easy for a patron to get there, as long as the Texas sun wasn’t an issue! And hey, they could even grab something to eat. 🙂

Google Maps is a great resource and can be really helpful for planning trips, regardless of your method of getting there. The only thing I would caution is to blindly follow Google Maps’ directions, especially in regards to transit direction. Always check with VIA too, so that you’re not bummed when you realize your planned route is actually cancelled or diverted due to construction!

Who doesn’t love a good meme? Using Mozilla Webmaker/Thimble, I was able to quickly create the above meme. I love that it shows you step by step what you’re doing, in a way that is not intimidating and allows you to understand how a few keystrokes can drastically change the code you’re working on. This is definitely a resource that could be used in a variety of library programs, and even for staff training, as a way to introduce people to HTML and CSS.

A few weeks, the teens at the Encino Branch Library did a Skype call with teens from the City of East Lansing Library! It was a blast, although it certainly did not come without complications.

My first task was making sure I could connect with the librarian at CoEL. We initially tried connecting through Google Hangouts, but for some reason, it kept cutting our call after a few seconds. Odd. We switched over to Skype, and voila! Great connection, great video, great sound, we were good to go.

When it was time for the call later that day, we ran into another issue. The librarian had called me from her office in her library, but during the actual teen-to-teen talk, she was in a different part of the library–far away from the WiFi router, apparently. Although the audio was good, the video feed was extremely choppy and the quality was poor. The teens still managed to “hang out,” but overall the experience definitely left something to be desired!

It just goes to show that you can never be fully prepared for technology’s limitations. Even though we took steps to make sure our video call would be a success, we forgot that there are so many factors to take into account to ensure a great video call can be accomplished. It is always best to test out EVERYTHING beforehand, especially if you are unsure of the Internet connection, so that you aren’t surprised when things go astray! We will definitely be having another video call in the future, and we’ll be much more prepared then.

I love the Disney World 404 page, mostly because it features one of my favorite Disney characters, Stitch! Cute and quick to the point, it lets the user know something is wrong.

For this challenge, I decided to look for a book similar to Ready Player One. Now this book itself is pretty unique for a variety of reasons, so I wanted to test out NoveList’s limits. Going against the advice of this lesson, I decided to check multiple appeal factors–basically, everything I liked about the book: science fiction, fast-paced, dystopias, geeks, locks and keys, popular culture, puzzles, quests, social networks, virtual reality.

Yeah…selecting all of those only gave me Ready Player One as a suggestion, as I suspected. I started removing appeal factors one at a time, but kept getting the same single result.

Finally, I decided to pick the two appeal factors that really made Ready Player One interesting to me: dystopias and virtual reality. Bingo! 19 results! After reading through the small blurbs, I can definitely see how these suggestions are similar and I am confident that a patron would feel the same.

NoveList is a great resource, for patrons AND staff. It makes the experience of finding similar books easy, fun, and convenient!

The LearningExpress Library was super easy to use! It only took me a few seconds to register my account, and the interface is simple enough to navigate without any issues. I like the various ways you can interact with the menu (such as the rotating images in the middle of the page, or the All Centers dropdown at the top of the page) and everything is very easy to see. As I recently attended a SET Training for Recruitment, I decided to do a tutorial about Interviewing with Confidence (available in the Jobs & Career Accelerator category). I have no trouble finding the category I wanted to browse, or starting the actual tutorial. This is definitely a resource we should recommend to our patrons!

1. There are 29 articles in the May 2001 issues.
2. For volume 80, issue 9, there are 26 articles.

There are 46 articles in the June 2014 issue of Consumer Reports! Databases are awesome. 🙂

To me, marketing is an essential part of what we do at the library. Better yet, it’s an essential part of how well we do what we do at the library. Without clear marketing of our programs, events, and services, our patrons would never know when to come to the library or what their library membership can offer them.

Finding tools that make marketing easier for us is great! Especially because as awesome as our marketing team is, we can’t always ask them to make every little flyer we need. By giving us the tools to make marketing pieces for our own branch services and programs, we can ensure that we are keeping a consistent image of SAPL for our patrons while also doing our part to market ourselves. So I definitely think that using tools like Canva or PicMonkey can help us create better marketing pieces, especially when used in conjunction with the flyer templates provided by our Marketing team.

Here’s a flyer I made with Canva for a book display of YA titles picked by the teens at Encino. It was simple to make and it looks really clean, making it extremely effective in catching the eye of patrons who walk by!