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.

Who has time for New Year’s celebrations, right?

But I believe that when we don’t feel like we have time to celebrate is exactly when we most need to do it. It’s one of those “red flags” that means stress is taking control. So, I’m taking a short breather to look back at what happened at WebJunction in 2010, convinced that this is a good way to maintain the healthy perspective that is required to keep us motivated and focused. I invite you to do the same for your year.

Looking at the pile of numbers my colleagues sent me, all I can say is: the WebJunction community was busy this year!

Here are some examples of what you did:

• 4,500 members enrolled in a total of 12,000 courses
• 7,426 people attended one or more of the 37 webinars we hosted, and 1,549 attended our two online conferences.
• 340,737 unique visitors came to the website to view 3,301,240 pages. [We have that many pages? Yikes, perhaps it's time to do some weeding!]
• Library staff used TechAtlas to inventory 23,960 new computers.
• 11,000 people joined as new members in 2010, and 2,500 subscribed to Crossroads e-newsletter.
• 108 state library officers attended one of four in-person Project Compass summits hosted around the country and/or the follow-on online summit to help address the increased traffic and demands on public libraries from the unemployed.

Plus, there are 1,246 Twitterers out there now following WebJunction’s Twitter feed of news and information about libraries; and 858 Facebook users are hanging out with us at Facebook.com/WebJunctionNews, discussing the issues of the day.

WebJunction started the year like many libraries did, with making tough belt-tightening decisions and reprioritizing around the essentials. We were pleased to see that despite having to work with reduced staff and resources, WebJunction content and programming actually grew in 2010. Some examples:

• 600 new documents were published, by WJ staff, WJ partners, and members of the WJ community.
• New courses were added to the catalog, such as the Microsoft Office 2010 suite and LibraryU’s Storytelling course.
• We hosted our first two free online conferences ever, one in February on Technology Essentials and then in December on Serving 21st-Century Patrons.
• We gained three new state library agency partners: Florida, Pennsylvania, and our newest–Virginia.
• We formed a programming partnership ALA TechSource that led to cohosted webinars and discounts on ALA publications for WebJunction members.
• We improved the Groups functionality, so that members can more easily find and stay in touch with the members of their group.
• We redesigned the Home page.
• The Workforce Resources community of practice grew by leaps and bounds: it now has 88 documents, 16 discussion threads, and an active live Twitter feed; much of the content has been contributed by the community. This was the most visited topic page on WebJunction in 2010. We also kicked off the second Project Compass initiative, which will result in more library staff training to support job seekers and the unemployed (and more content on WebJunction.org!).
• The Patron Training section grew a new Technology Training section at the end of the year, and it already has a couple dozen resources.
• We spotlit content and hosted free webinars focused on a wide range of issues, including (take a deep breath now)

  Website Development
  Library Videos
  Libraries and Workforce Recovery
  Mini Conferences & Web Conferencing
  Legal Information Resources
  E-Government
  Marketing the Library
  TechAtlas Tools
  Online Community Building
  Services to Older Adults
  Leadership Skills
  Libraries and Access to All
  Services to Spanish Speakers
  Public Access Computers
  Social Networking & Web Tools
  Digitization & Preservation
  Gadgets for the Library
  Disaster Planning
  Services to Teens
  Customer Service
  Rural Library Trustees
  Tool for Job Seekers
  Technology Planning
  Competencies
  Wireless Networking
  Virtual Orientation
  Patron Training
  Workforce Agency Partnerships
  Support of Small Business

Finally, we ended the year by greeting our newest and youngest WebJunction member, Veronica Rose Hill Briggs, who was born on Dec. 19 to WebJunction Director Chrystie Hill.

Gee, that’s a lot to celebrate!

“I heard about the library-passport program and thought it was really cool,” said Thompson, 28. “I love going to my library. It’s such an incredible resource. My goal is to get people excited about visiting their local branch.”

Thompson had originally planned to visit all 28 branches of the Seattle Public Library system in one day, but freezing temperatures and early library closures shortened his list. Besides the 11 branches he was able to reach before snow forced them to close, he also visited 6 more branches which he photographed.

Seattle Public Library created the Library Passport program to celebrate the completion of its Libraries for All program, encouraging library patrons to visit the new and remodeled library branches.

To read more about Sam Thompson’s library marathon, see the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s article, A marathon task: Runner logs 50 miles visiting library branches in one day. Also see SPL’s recent news release on other locals’ programs centered around the Passport.

I was also led to this more librarian in-joke costume. Sheesh, good thing it was the concise AACR2!

Can you match that? Show us what you got.

The key value that is the focus for 2008′s event is “online participation in democracy,” in acknowledgement of the Internet’s substantive impact on this year’s U.S. presidential election. The big day is this Monday, September 22.

Go to their simple yet cool website to learn about the scheduled events around the world and how you and your library can participate. I would suggest contributing to the e-Democracy Time Capsule (hurry, only a few days left to add content!).

You can also check out Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s press conference from the WWW2008 conference held in Beijing, plus his “global message” (kinda like Santa Claus?) videocast from 2007.