I’ll outline here some of the highlights of the webinar. Vance covered five planning steps for National Legislative Day.

Step #1: create a one-pager about your library

• highlights your library’s programs and resources that you provide to their constituents
• library funding, especially if highlights a federal partnership
• outline how congress can help your library

Step #2: Brainstorm your personal story

• Come up with a personal story about your library to share with the legislators
• Outline benefits you’ve provided such as people you’ve helped, community meetings you’ve had, partnerships you’ve developed, etc.
• Who have you helped?
• Create a website that asks your patrons why they love the library and use the list of stories in your advocacy

Step #3: Learn about the issues

• Understand national issues that are most important to you, and learn as much as you can about them (copyright, funding, telecommunications, etc.)
• look at ALA issue papers from the Washington office
• It’s fine to say “I don’t know, but I’ll get back to you.”

Step #4: Learn about your legislators

• Who represents you and your library?
• Biographical information on legislators can be found at thomas.loc.gov
• Understanding biographical information can give you details that can give you something to talk about with your legislator and develop a relationship
• Connect the library to the legislator’s issues
• Find out who on staff deals with library issues
• Best to telephone or email your legislator. Mail, including postcards, is still getting irradiated so it’s not the most effective way to reach your legislator.

Step #5: Coordinate your message

• During Legislative Day, coordinate with others in your state to determine who will make which “ask”, which stories are most compelling, and who will coordinate follow-up.
• Follow-up is the most important thing to make sure elected officials listen to your message.

Some other points to consider …

If you feel restricted in your community in not being able to directly advocate, then get your Board and your Friends do the advocacy on your behalf.

One little thing that makes all the difference? Persistence.

Contact your local state coordinator to participate in Legislative Day.

You’ll get no argument from me on the the premise of this campaign: “Libraries Work Because We Do.” I love my library and all my library friends and invite you to pat your co-workers, friends, employees, or (even yourself) on the back today.

If you have an library appreciation /awareness event in the works, we’d love to hear about it. If you don’t, well, never fear; ALA/APA has your back with some quick celebration ideas. While you are on their site, take a gander at the map of library stars. You may find someone you know.

Finally, don’t forget to share your plans for this and other events you are running during National Library Week! We’d love it if you’d share your thoughts in the blog or our Library Week discussion in the WebJunction community forums.

I’ll highlight specific resources and activities later in the post, but right now I’ve got to tell you how excited I am about the wacky-good promotional Library Week videos you can download from the AL Focus site.

These videos turn normally stale library stats (”Reference librarians in the nation’s public and academic libraries answer more than 7.2 million questions weekly“) on their ear. I mean, where else are you going to find a video campaign that combines romance novels and vending machines, brings literature and Johnny Depp to the McDonalds Drive-in window, stumps viewers with the really important reference questions, and takes them inside a high-stakes game of ID-card Go Fish.Genius!The shelf life of this campaign is sure to extend well beyond next week and should make for clever marketing videos for the entire year. Instructions are available for downloading and embedding. You are even invited to use the the animated intro as a lead-in to your own library cinematic creation. Let us know if you make one!

All right, on to the rest of the week’s goodies. Individual events for the week include:

• Monday: Submit your library star nominee
• Tuesday: National Library Workers Day
• Thursday: YALSA Support Teen Literature Day
• Friday: Library Gaming Day (Gaming @ Your Library)

And a smattering of resources to help you plan your events:

• ALA National Library Week Fact Sheet (and don’t forget the Julie Andrews promos)
• Who needs the Public Library video via WebJunction
• Lesson Plans, Projects and Resources from Education World
• Library Week Activity Page at I Love Libraries
• Library Postal Art History
• Chicagoist Blog Celebrates Libraries
• Special Library Celebration Ideas from WJ-Illinois
• National Library Week South Africa from “It’s All Good“
• Inspirational ideas for children

As the week goes on this list should get even more rich thanks to all the nuggets you’ll submit via comments (You are planning to comment, aren’t you?), your blog posts out there on the interweb, your ticklish, snippet-filled tweets (I’m thinking “#NatLibWk08″ hashtag could work), and so on.

And if it turns out that a whole week still doesn’t allow enough time to get your library groove on, you can relax— you’ve got more time. April is School Library Media Month. Phew! I think LibraryLand has us Aries covered.

Do you have something fun planned for National Library Week? As always, let us know here in the comments or in the National Library Week discussion thread on WebJunction.

We’re on the cusp of the second annual YALSA Teen Tech week. The program encourages teens to “tune-in” and use their local library as the place they can become competent and ethical users of technologies ranging from research databases to DVD authoring to music downloads.

We’ve started a discussion thread to help the WJ community to share creative ideas for activities, promotions, and events. Come to think of it, this is also a great place for procrastinators (we know who we are) to harvest compelling, last-minute programming ideas.

As part of next week’s event, YALSA is conducting a two-phase survey to learn more about how teens access and use technology, including social networking sites; one bonus outcome of the week should mean a better understanding of teen technology habits and skills for all of us.

As always, we encourage you to post your ideas and experience (and images!) here and in the forums. Here are a few resources to get you started:

• WebJunction Teen and Technology Resources
• Teen Tech info at the YALSA Wiki
• Activity Ideas for Teen Tech Week
• Background on Teen Tech week
• 25 self-directed Teen Tech activities (There’s some great stuff—suggestions to blog, create a YouTube video, Try LibraryThing, and much more)

We look forward to hearing about your plans and experiences!

Anyway, one of the projects I’m working on (with my colleagues here at the WJ, including ‘my’ librarian) is gathering some basic info about librarians in the US. Who are we? What do we do? Where do we work? How many of us are there? Frankly, though I don’t often come right out and say it, I’m generally not all that interested in numbers, but this project proved to be pretty interesting and so I thought I’d share some of our findings:

Two ideas emerge from these stats. First, if the bulk of retiring librarians is at the director level, who will the profession promote to those positions? Even if the post-MLIS force keeps up with retirees, will they be ready for the positions they’re asked to fill? Second, if MLIS students are increasingly moving into non-traditional environments instead of taking traditional positions in public, school, academic or other types of libraries, where does that leave us institutionally?

I’d like to append to these facts and figures with an impression that has developed for me through conversation with colleagues over the last several years. Some of my friends in LibraryLand, many of whom are extremely innovative, ambitious, and eager to contribute to the profession, are often struggling in their library jobs. They seem unsupported by their institutions, sometimes specifically by their library directors and senior colleagues. Age, along with tech savvy or advocacy and a shift towards community-based authority or expertise layers in additional divisive factors, sometimes widening the gap between ‘us’ and ‘them’. I have personally benefited from relationships and mentoring with elders in our field - I won’t call them traditionalists! - as well as from very strong institutional support from my employer for my work. But I’m wondering if there’s a way to shift our culture as a profession so that my experiences along these lines are more of a norm, rather than an exception.

And so, how can we bridge these gaps in our daily work? Can we create inter-generational or inter-experiential dialog and (two-way) mentoring so that the library profession, and our institutions, can thrive (not just survive) in the midst of this particular change?

I’ve been thinking a lot about how to approach this. At least two projects in the works so far! Stay tuned…

1. Refresh!

2. Meetings!

Well, that might be a slight over simplification, but we really have been kicking up some dust ’round WebJunction way lately, both in relation to current projects and in relation to the planning of future projects. Sweet, sweet planning, how we love you (I really mean that btw).

Have you heard any of us say lately that this is the most exciting time ever to work in/with and/or for libraries? The buzz is palpable around the office, the main WebJunction site, the Community Partner sites, and most importantly in lots of libraries all over the place, the very libraries that are the reason we exist in the first place. Sure, I sound like a cheerleader, but I promise you it is genuine and well deserved excitement.

Now, just so you know we are working hard in our many meetings to get the things you need us and want us to get accomplished actually accomplished, I offer you a bit of a visual riddle. Perhaps the riddle might soften the blow of fewer blog posts this week? Sadly, I can’t really jump out there and say the answer to the visual riddle provided below. Still, it might be fun to hear your speculations about this image. What the heck were we doing in this meeting anyway? Rest assured we do know! *snicker* Even though *we* know, it might fun to hear what you might guess. You’ll play nice with this one, right? Here’s the picture (click it for a link to a larger size if you need it):

Anyone care to speculate?

I do appreciate the recognition, but I try not to get too swept up in the gold-star-gathering, as my friend Brian and I like to call it. Why am I being recognized for my work at WebJunction? Because of the work we do together as a community of library staff members, library organization partners, and even as WJ staff. I truly feel that it’s because of you that they even noticed me! Why do we do this work? To support libraries, ensuring that they’re vibrant and visible in every community. I am honored, and I should have said as much, but I do like to try and keep a lid on the size of my head…and my silence about it was an attempt to do that.

I’m reminded by George that it’s not always a good idea to keep a lid on everything — I know, I know, I know (though sometimes forget) that shameless self-promotion also raises awareness, shares ideas, and inspires collaboration. (Some call it marketing, I call it advocacy. Is there really a difference?)
In that spirit, I would also like to point out the difference we’re making with ALA, as described by John Berry at LJ. I feel very, very proud (hopefully it’s not coming before a fall!) to be included in John’s list of examples of the “revolution” we are all a part of. I said over in this job rocks that I know it gets better. Well, here we are, and there’s more to come!