SAVE THE DATE!  February 25, 2012

Plan to attend Spotlight on Your Career:  Capitalize on Change on February 25, 2012 at the University of Denver’s new education building, Ruffatto Hall. This joint program, offered by the Colorado Association of Law Libraries (CoALL) and the Rocky Mountain Chapter of the Special Libraries Association (RMSLA), will benefit librarians of every type, no matter where you are in your career path. Speaker Mary Ellen Bates will discuss the future of library services and how we can capitalize on changes in our profession to make ourselves and our libraries more integral and valued parts of our organizations. She will also lead an interactive panel discussion of librarians from many types of libraries to discuss what does (and doesn’t) work in making effective and longstanding change.

This program will enable you to do the following:

• List 4 ways changes to library services would add value to your organization to help it grow

• Discuss 2 methods of promoting library services to increase patron use

• Plan 3 strategies to make your library and yourself more visible within your organization

• Predict 2 technologies that will change the way you deliver library services in the future and at least 4 ways you can utilize those technologies to provide integral information and research services to your organization and your patrons

If you have questions regarding this program prior to the dissemination of our registration information in early February, please feel free to contact Kelly Fanning at kfanning@international.edu.

CoALL and RMSLA co-sponsored the 2011 Spotlight on your Career at the CU Law Library on Feb 26.  In addition to amazing speakers, there was a Technology Petting Zoo so attendees could actually handle the good stuff.  Many thanks to RMSLAer & uber-communicator Connie Clem for this report:

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This year’s Spotlight was well attended, interactive, and useful. Megan Kinney (Community College of Aurora) and Matt Hamilton (Anythink Libraries) were the presenters.

In Megan’s block, we talked about what “emerging” means and the key role of info pros in relating to clients/users on their own level to help them understand and use new technologies. Matt talked (among other things) about info pros tending to be in the early adopter demographic; library users increasingly getting into content creation; and a trend toward transliteracy, or being comfortable using all types of media. And we talked about apps.

And the pet-ables were friendly, not fanged. There were multiple iterations of Nooks and Kindles and a 7″ Droid tablet, the Archos, thanks to Matt Hamilton and Sarah Reinhardt for that memory refresher on the actual brand name.

http://www.archos.com/products/imt/archos_7/index.html

My socks were blown by the possibilities inherent in the LiveScribe smartpen – http://www.livescribe.com/en-us/

For people who couldn’t make it, here are links Megan shared to “get our tech on”:

LITA – Library Information Technology Association, http://www.lita.org

TechSoup for Libraries project, Share and Learn page – http://www.techsoupforlibraries.org/share-and-learn

Moodle demonstration site – http://moodle.org , for people who create online learning

WebJunction technology answers – http://www.webjunction.org/technology

For a fairly small subscription fee, http://www.lynda.com/ offers technology tutorials.

And Megan pointed us to this list by Librarian In Black, Sarah Houghton-Jan, on Technology Skills Library Staff Should Have:  http://alalearning.org/2011/01/21/techskills/

Matt’s learning links include:

http://www.howcast.com/ for videos on how to do just about anything

Sites like http://www.aroundme.com/ that make it easy to find a coffee joint (or whatever) when you need one, based on your mobile GPS location

http://evernote.com/ for storing your thoughts, photos, etc. on the cloud so they’re accessible on whatever device you’re using to connect.

Kudos to Esti Shay, Mary Arnold, Sheena Barbour, Shannon Marshall, Rachel Nelson, and Julie Teglovic for putting the event together on behalf of CoALL and RMSLA.

Thanks to contributors Thomson-Reuters, LexisNexis, and HeinOnline, to the CU Law School for hosting the session, and to the librarians of the William A. Wise Law Library for arranging the venue.