New:

• Economic Gardening: libraries help to grow local economies
  Find out how libraries can nurture this exciting idea.
• Community and Library Services Analysis Tools
  Analysis worksheets created by Kitty Yancheff of the Humboldt County Library in Eureka, California to assess community and library services to triage social services.
• Speaking of Kitty, she is one of the presenters in Thursday’s (Jan 28) webinar on Libraries and Workforce Recovery. If you miss it, there will be an archive.
• In fact, there’s a collection of links to Webinar Archives related to Economic Recovery.
• There is a new addition to the Impact Studies and Reports document— a link to ALA’s report A Perfect Storm Brewing: Budget cuts threaten public library services at time of increased demand.

Workforce Resources will continue to grow. We welcome your contributions. Tell us what your library is doing to guide patrons toward recovery. Share your stories of patrons who were steered toward success with the help of the library.

View the webinar archive »
Visit the new Group »

In this webinar, Nancy will focus on librarians as community technology stewards. She will offer practical steps for you to begin to understand your community, assess the technology needs of your community, and how to select, configure, and support the online technologies your community uses. Here’s a sample of her well-stocked slideshare account to give you a taste of her passion and commitment to building relevant online communities. The definition of ”technology steward” (slide 9 & 10 ) sounds so much like our work in libraries, that I’m sure there are many of us in libraryland who are eager to change our job titles!

I blogged about my CiL presentation back in March, after Sheila Kearns led me to the Digital Habitats project (thanks again, Sheila) and Nancy White commented on my post!  So you can only imagine how excited I am to bring Nancy and her work to the WebJunction community and for the way it relates to technology stewardship @ your library.

View the archive for the webinar »

While grants have explicit start and end dates, the work we do at TechSoup to support libraries does not. TechSoup’s MaintainIT Project was funded by a 3-year grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation that ended last month. It’s hard to believe that three years have passed, but March 31 just came and went, because nothing really changed for us behind the scenes of MaintainIT. And nothing much will, really…We’re continuing to support libraries and we’ll continue to share stories from libraries, so please stay in touch.

And we here at WebJunction would like to invite you to join the celebration as we honor the over 400 Cookbook contributors, share lessons learned from the project, and to let you know that the Cookbooks are alive and well on WebJunction. In addition to all three MaintainIT Cookbooks, WebJunction is home to the Cookbook Contributors Group, the collaborative group who uses and updates the Cookbooks.

You’re encouraged to join the group if you’re responsible for buying, supporting or maintaining your library’s technology, so you can continue to share your experiences, solutions and challenges with others. And we’re excited to provide a number of ways for folks to update and build upon the Cookbooks over time.

Please join tomorrow’s virtual celebration, where you’ll get top technology tips from library technology experts, hear what MaintainIT Project staff learned from their many conversations and library travels around the country, and learn more about how you can keep the Cookbook community alive on WebJunction.

In these tough times, there’s little more important than recognizing the efforts of so many people committed to sustaining strong and relevant technologies in our libraries, who have taken the time to share their experience and expertise so that all libraries might benefit. Here’s to all who have stopped “reinventing the wheel”!

Register for the webinar »

REPORTS ON CALCULATING A LIBRARY’S RETURN ON INVESTMENT
Compiled by Don Reynolds, Past President of the Association of Rural and Small Libraries, and Director, Nolichucky Regional Library, Morristown, Tennessee
Updated February 20, 2009

Public Library Benefits Valuation Study. St. Louis Public Library, April 2001.

Library’s Contribution to Your Community. Illinois Regional Library Systems, 2002/3.

Libraries: How they stack up. An OCLC Report. OCLC, 2003.

Value of Public Library Service. Massachusetts Library Association, October 2003. Also available: “Estimated retail value and Values explained” and Calculator work sheet

The Economic Impact of Public Libraries on South Carolina. January 2005.

Taxpayer Return-on-Investment (ROI) in Pennsylvania Public Libraries. Pennsylvania Library Association, September 2006.

Value for Money: Southwestern Ohio’s Return from Investment in Public Libraries. November 2006. Report Summary

Making Cities Stronger: Public Library Contributions to Local Economic Development. Urban Libraries Council, January 2007.

Worth Their Weight – An Assessment of the Evolving Field of Library Valuation. Americans for Libraries Council (Libraries for the Future), May 2007. Two notes:
1.) This report summarizes all the various valuation projects from around the country.
2.) I was having some trouble getting this to download, but was told by Libraries for the Future that the website issue is being addressed.

Vermont Library Association’s Library Use Value Calculator – What is your library worth to you? August 2007. (Note: Follows Massachusetts model.)

Return on Investment for Public Libraries. Library Research Service (Colorado), 2007/8. Note: This site also includes numerous case studies of individual libraries. Individual ROI Calculator.

Return on Investment (ROI). North Suburban Library System (Illinois), 2008. (Note: Two calculators are available here, one for a library’s return on investment to the community, one for the ROI for an individual.)

Maine State Library’s Library Use Value Calculator. Updated 2008. Note: This approach also follows Massachusetts model.

New York Libraries: How They Stack Up! Revised October 2008. Printable brochure version, also revised October 2008

At the OCLC Symposium held on Saturday, David Weinberger (of Everything is Miscellaneous and Cluetrain Manifesto) and Nova Spivack (of twine.com and grandson of Peter Drucker) talked about the semantic web, and what it means for libraries. Both Spivack and Weinberger emphasized the power of the collective, and the importance of understanding the social graph. When asked by an audience member what it meant for information professionals, Weinberger said “you need to be in a smart network”, meaning, make sure you are on Facebook and twitter, or whatever relevant online community space there is. But make sure the people in your network are saying smart things, and pointing you to good information. You can check out the tweets of other attendees to get a sense of the lively conversation the talk engendered.

On Sunday, David Lee King, Cindi Trainor, and WebJunction’s own Rachel Van Noord gave a talk about putting the library into the online spaces where your users are and how to cultivate that online community space. David’s library in Topeka, Kansas is on Facebook and twitter with friends and  use YouTube to share online book reviews and guides to using the library. But what he emphasized was that these tools are not just mechanisms to push out information, but are instead platforms for engaging their community members into a conversation with the library.

In the same talk, Cindi talked about how her library uses LibX, an internet broswer plug-in which literally situates library resources into online resources such as Wikipedia, Google Scholar results, and amazon and barnes & noble search results. Rachel ended the presentation by talking about the 5 principles of cultivating online community, re-emphasizing David’s point that conversation and leadership are keys to engaging people in the online space.

My conference badge is sporting a new Weaver ribbon, which I acquired at a social event hosted by the multi-talented trainer/consultant Pat Wagner. A Weaver is someone who has mastered the art of networking, someone who recognizes patterns in interactions with people and makes the connections that result in positive action. I am an apprentice Weaver.

This midwinter conference is allowing me lots of practice. I am here as a Board member of CLENE and an emissary of WebJunction. The conflation of interests between these two organizations is full of potential. The best thing they have in common is members who are interested in continual learning and who are dynamic, innovative, congenial, creative …I could go on. Paul S always says it better.

I love the opportunity to meet up in person. I appreciate even more the virtual connectedness that allows us to weave all of these relationships into powerful actions no matter the physical location. We are all producing a masterful tapestry that tells the story of libraries.

thx 4 the txt

Can’t make that session? In a seredipitous twist of fate, my colleague Kathryn Perkins and I will be presenting much of the same information in a webcast for Workforce Magazine on Tuesday, 1/27. Our title is “Unleashing the Power of your Customer Communities” and our session will begin at 2pm ET — we’d love to have you join that session as well. Registration information can be found on Workforce Magazine’s website.

The Living Library is an innovative project designed to promote dialogue and reduce prejudices. It gives patrons the opportunity to speak informally with “people on loan” in order to challenge stereotypes and prejudices in a very personal and positive manner. These “living books” represent a wide range of ages, genders and cultural background and can be “checked out” by patrons for one-to-one or group discussions.

For example, the Bainbridge Island living books covered such diverse topics as life as a quadriplegic, a female police officer, a young gay man and an atheist, and the 14 Santa Monica Library “books” included a former homeless woman, two Buddhists, a raw-food expert, a feminist and a nudist (clothed). Both events were very well-received and each drew in over a hundred participants.

For more information about the Living Library program, see their website at http://living-library.org. Also check out articles in Library Journal and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and on MSNBC.com, and listen to an interview from KUOW, the Pacific Northwest’s NPR affiliate.