Author Archives: Susan Knisely

The Nebraska Learns 2.0 online learning program has been keeping many Nebraska librarians, media specialists, and board members busy these past few months. Participants have really stepped up to the plate and created quite a nice online community – sharing ideas, helping each other out, and cheering each other on. It’s been a real privilege to witness and participate in the learning!
Since Nebraska Learns 2.0 kicked off on Monday, October 6, 2008 we’ve had over 160 participants create blogs and start the program. To date, at least 20 participants have completed all 23 Things! And many others are getting close to completion!
Participants, if you’re not done yet please remember that the official deadline to complete the program is Friday, January 30, 2009! You must complete all 23 Things by this deadline in order to earn 15 CE credits from the Nebraska Library Commission and have your name entered into a prize drawing. Remember, there is no partial CE credit for partial completion of this project. All 23 Things must be completed by the deadline.
As participants successfully complete the Nebraska Learns 2.0 program, we will highlight their blog names in orange on the Participants page. If you believe you have completed the program but your blog name isn’t orange, please confirm that your blog contains posts for Thing #3 (your first test post) & Things #5-23. If it does and we have failed to change your blog name font color, please get in touch with any one of us (Allana, Christa, Michael, or Susan) so that we can make sure you get your credit.
Also, don’t forget! We need to know WHO you are in order to award CE credit. If CE credit is important to you please make sure an asterisk appears next to your blog name on the Participants page. The asterisk means we know who you are. If there is no asterisk it means you still need to identify yourself to one of us.
There are still two weeks left to complete this program, so if you’re not done don’t despair. Some of our late starters were our first finishers! And don’t forget, if you have questions or run into any difficulties, we are here to help!

The Nebraska Library Commission is offering a group discount to all Nebraska librarians who attend the Computers in Libraries 2009 conference. The conference is planned for March 30 – April 1, 2009, at the Hyatt Regency Crystal City in Arlington, VA. Detailed information about the conference can be found on the conference web page.
The price of the conference with the discount is $234.00 for the three-day event (March 30 – April 1). This is more than a 50 percent savings off the regular price. No discount rates are available for the pre- or post-conference seminars and workshops.
In addition, discount prices of $109.00 on the Internet@Schools East conference and $234.00 for the combo of Internet@Schools East and Computers in Libraries general conference are also available.
To register for the conference, print off and complete the <http://www.nlc.state.ne.us/netserv/CIL2009_GroupDiscountFormNLC.pdf> CIL 2009 Registration Form. Mail the completed form to Sue Biltoft at the address below. Payment must accompany your registration form (checks or credit cards payable to Information Today, Inc.) To receive the discount your registration MUST be sent to the Nebraska Library Commission. Completed registration forms must be received by February 13, 2009.
Sue Biltoft
Nebraska Library Commission
1200 N St., Suite 120
Lincoln, NE 68508-2023
Phone: 402-471-4009 or 800-307-2665

On February 12, at 4:00 p.m. Second Life Time (that’s 6:00 p.m. our time) several of us in the Network Services department attended the Michigan Library Consortium’s monthly lecture series in Second Life. The topic was Evergreen, the Open Source ILS. The event was hosted by MLC’s Evette Atkins (Evie Mikazuki) and included presentations by Don McMorris (Don Graysmark), Technical Support Specialist at Equinox, the Evergreen Experts, and Tim Daniels (ISBNContepomi) from the Georgia Public Library Service, which administers Evergreen for the state of Georgia.
This event is noteworthy for several reasons. First, it was interesting to hear librarians talk about a large-scale implementation of an open source ILS, since there is interest in exploring the possibility of doing something like this in Nebraska. Second, it was a good example of the sort of professional development and interaction that can occur in a virtual world like Second Life.
If you’d like to view the PowerPoints used by the two presenters and read through the chat transcript, they are available via MLC’s Evergreen blog. (Rod, if you scroll to the end of the transcript, you’ll see that one of the attendees specifically asked us to tell you hello!)

Originally uploaded by Overduebook

If you’re a regular NPR Morning Edition listener, you may have caught last week’s story about San Diego public radio station KPBS using Google My Maps and Twitter to keep residents informed about burned areas, shelter locations, road closings, and more.
This story really jumped out at me because it’s a great example of an organization finding a way to use free new web technologies to provide valuable services to the community it serves. It also proves that successful services can be implemented quickly, without months of pre-planning and discussion.
What made this possible? Play! According to Online Managing Editor Leng Caloh, “The playing that a lot of us on the team do in our free time has been the key to our success.”
Did team members have a clear notion of the work applications of My Maps and Twitter when they began to play with them? I’m guessing not. But the fact that they had played with My Maps and Twitter positioned them to see work applications when a new need arose.
I think there are several lessons for all of us in this story. For one thing, it’s a good reminder that technologies that seem frivolous to us today, may allow us to offer valuable services tomorrow. Also, time spent “playing” with new technology isn’t necessarily wasted; it often allows us to save time and money in the future, in ways we never could have predicted!
You can read or listen to a transcript of the original story on NPR’s Morning Edition web site
You can also:

• View the KPBS News Twitter Feed
• View KPBS’s interactive Google Map
• View community photos contributed to the KPBS San Diego Wildfire Photo Group on Flickr

Subscribing to library-related feeds is a great way to stay current with what’s going on in our profession. The Nebraska Library Commission Blog is available via an RSS feed, and so are many other great library-related resources.
To view a few of our favorite feeds, take a look at the public version of our Bloglines account. We’ve used it to create a list of recommended feeds for Nebraska librarians. (If you’re not familiar with Bloglines, it’s a free, web-based aggregator used for subscribing to and reading feeds.)
If you don’t currently track your own list of feeds, feel free to browse ours. When you’re ready to set up and customize your own, just let us know and we’ll gladly give you a hand!
Do you have your own favorite library feed that’s not included in our Bloglines account? If so, leave a comment letting us know what it is and why you like it!

They say in order to learn a new technology you have to give yourself
permission to play.  That can be hard to do when you’re swamped with
deadlines and ever-growing to-do lists.  Luckily, around the holidays,
things sometimes slow down.  Colleagues take vacation, phones stop ringing,
and emails are so far and few between you begin wondering if a server is down. 
What a great time to experiment!

That’s just what several of us at the Nebraska Library Commission did the
Friday before Christmas.  By 3:00 in the afternoon it was pretty dead
around our offices. Those who had places to go had already gone and the rest of
you weren’t calling in or emailing us–we felt sort of like the Maytag
repairman! That’s when we got out the digital camera and the Nancy Pearl
librarian action figure……

If you’ve been watching the NLC Announcements page and various mailing lists,
you know that the Network Services department is offering our first-ever Flickr training in
January and February.  As you can imagine, that means we are
busily trying to familiarize ourselves with the ins and outs of the service. 
In addition to setting up a
Nebraska Library
Commission Flickr Account back in August, we’ve created and administer two
Flickr groups–Nebraska
Libraries, where people can post pictures of Nebraska libraries, and
Pets of Nebraska
Librarians.  

In our explorations of Flickr we’ve discovered libraries doing lots of
creative, fun, and innovative things with their Flickr accounts.  We’ve
also discovered Flickr groups that are providing great forums for librarians to
share thoughts and ideas. 
On the Friday before Christmas, however, we were looking for something a bit more whimsical and
distracting — and the Nancy
Pearl Librarian Action Figure group fit the bill!

So, as I mentioned above, armed with a digital camera and a Nancy Pearl
Librarian Action Figure, we set out to take some pictures that
we could add to the group.  Our goal was to use Nancy as a prop to
highlight not only Nebraska Library Commission services and projects, but also
to promote Nebraska in general.      
   

In total, we posted 12 "Nancy Pearl" photos to the Library Commission Flickr
account and to the Nancy Pearl Librarian Action Figure group.  You can
check out our results

here.  (If you do look, be sure to view the individual photo
pages–we’ve added "notes" to some of the pictures!) 

So what did we learn?  Well, I can only speak for myself, but I got to
go through the process of joining a public Flickr group. I also learned that taking photos and uploading them to Flickr
is easy compared to the creative challenge of writing captions and descriptions
and adding notes and tags.  I
also saw first hand how adding photos to a group draws traffic to your Flickr
site and stimulates interaction.  Soon after we added our photos to the
group they were viewed multiple times, and several librarians in the group made
us (the Nebraska Library Commission) a contact.  Not bad for the Friday afternoon before Christmas!

P.S. If you’re interested in Flickr but won’t be able to attend one of the
currently scheduled training sessions, check out our
Flickr Information &
Training Resources web page!

P.P.S. If your library has a Flickr account you’d like to show off, consider sharing it with your fellow Nebraska librarians via a comment to this post! We’d love to see what you’re up to!