The days are getting noticeably longer in the Northwest, a welcome return of the light after a long period of leaving for and returning from work in the dark. It is also the time when a year’s worth of data comes to light as a reflection of what was accomplished in the previous twelve months. Although January 1^st is an arbitrary blip in the continuum of busy activity, it is illuminating to look back and bask a bit.

WebJunction shines because of the participation and contributions from the library community. Whether you’re a registered member, a webinar attendee, a social networked follower or a visitor to the site, you a part of the numbers that add up to another busy and successful year.

• 341,123 unique visitors came to the website to view 2,991,000 pages.
• 11,587 people joined as new members in 2011, and 3,455 subscribed to Crossroads e-newsletter.
• 7376 people attended one or more of the 32 webinars we hosted plus the August online conference on Trends in Library Training and Learning 2011. Registration and attendance for the 2-day conference was the highest ever for a live WebJunction event.
  
• 4,993 members enrolled in 16,836 courses, and completed 7,277 of them.
• Library staff used TechAtlas to inventory 16,594 new computers.
• Plus, there are now 2, 270 followers of WebJunction’s Twitter feed, where we posted 1,937 tweets of news and information about libraries.
• 1276 Facebook users are hanging out with us at Facebook.com/WebJunctionNews.
• There’s been a lot of conversation on our LinkedIn WebJunction group, where 1954 members engage each other on a variety of current topics; there’s even a sub-group with 364 members focusing on Social Media use in libraries.
• Project Compass focused its second year of effort on helping public library staff augment their services to the unemployed, delivering 54 full-day, in-person workshops to 1,242 frontline staff in 11 of the highest unemployment states; 38 workshops or presentations in other states reached 703 staff; and 339 from 22 states people participated in two online workshops.
  One participant summed up her workshop experience: “I have been in the workforce for 32 years and have been to various seminars. This by far was the best and most helpful one I’ve attended.”

As the online learning place for library staff, we strive to offer quality courses and current content. We happily share the credit with all of you who have contributed your knowledge to enhance the body of information housed on WebJunction.

• We did some weeding and trimming in our course catalog to keep it relevant and findable.
• 550 new documents were published by WebJunction staff, our partners, and members of the WebJunction community. Highlights from our partners include:
  • North Carolina’s Ereader Petting Zoo collection of documents on how to help staff get started with ereaders;
  • Illinois’ Business & Libraries: Working Together information on staff training workshops and other resources to help libraries support small business in their communities;
  • Washington’s Volunteer Engagement Strategies for Libraries materials from the Carla Lehn workshop series Transforming Life After 50.
• Our 32 webinar topics covered a wide range of topics, including:
  • The Entrepreneurial Librarian – Running the business of your library
  • Cataloging as Collaborative Librarianship
  • Developing Online Patron Tutorials
  • Putting the Public Back in Public Libraries: Community-Led Libraries
  • Creating a Web Presence for Every Library
  • Teaming Up with Teens @ Your Library
  • And many more
• The Workforce Resources community of practice grew so big, we had to divide it into sub-topics. For the second year in a row, this was the most visited topic page on WebJunction.

As budgets tighten and the world gets flatter, it becomes ever more important to form new partnerships and solidify existing ones. At WebJunction, we value these relationships highly.

• Texas became our newest state library agency partner this year. We look forward to welcoming more partners in the coming year.
• We had a very successful collaboration with the ALA Learning Round Table to plan, promote, host and present the online conference.
• Other programming partnerships included ALA TechSource, YALSA and ARSL.

Perhaps the most significant and exciting growth around our office is the WebJunction kids.

We celebrated the one-year birthday of Veronica Rose Hill Briggs. We welcomed the arrival of Shepard Russell (Gesinger) Turnbull and Coco Marie Maddison. We await the imminent arrival of TBD (Van Noord) Peterson. And we continue to enjoy the adventures of Loren and Clara Peterson.