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.

The Library 2.011 conference is a unique chance to participate in a global conversation on the current and future state of libraries. Subject strands include the changing roles of libraries and librarians, the increasing impact of digital media and the e-book revolution, open educational resources, digital literacy, shifts from information consumption to production (Web 2.0), multimedia and gaming spaces, libraries as community centers, the growth of individualized and self-paced learning, the library as the center of new learning models, understanding users in the digital age, assessing service delivery, and defining leadership and information professional careers in a networked and changing world.

The conference schedule is now online, with all 160+ sessions, and an individual hour-by-hour schedule calendar for all 36 time zones. Start on the Sessions and Schedule page, scroll down and click on your time zone, and browse the amazing line-up. The festivities start on Wednesday morning and last into the wee hours of the night on Thursday. Links to the live virtual rooms will be available when the conference starts. Session proposals are available to browse to help you decide which time of the day or night to join in. Hope to see you there!

View conference page »

A total of 1965 people registered or attended the event and 1082 logged in for at least one of the sessions. Many of those who logged in were doing so in order for staff in their library to join a Viewing Party. See the long list of Viewing Parties!. A special thank you to you viewing party hosts, and sorry if we didn’t get you on the list.

Also a special thanks to our sponsoring WebJunction Partner States who brought over 889 registrants and 500 attendees to the conference and who continue to support the networking and collaboration critical to the success of WebJunction’s online learning!

Many others are represented in the list of top 20 participating states:

And 90 participants represent these cities and countries around the globe:

Here’s the breakdown of the many library types represented:

As you can see from the broad representation across the globe and across the types of libraries you work in, the topics presented are indeed universal. From brain development to instructional design, from creating videos to creating community, the presentations were top-notch and inspirational. Betha provides an excellent summary of the 2 days in her post, Two-day online conference was a brain booster on the Learning Round Table Blog and you can view all the live-blogging we did here on BlogJunction. And be sure to check out the tweet archive for #learntrends!

I’d like to personally thank all of the planners (especially Sharon and Mary Beth from the LearningRT!), presenters, emcees, producers, viewing party hosts and all other participants, for joining the conference and for contributing to the success of WebJunction’s third online conference! I look forward to connecting with all of you in future online events.

Conference home »

There are so many patron demands to be met and so many ideas to explore that it can be overwhelming. Sometimes you just have to put one foot in front of the other and take the next step. That’s why we are pulling just a few good Practical Tips to Help Job Seekers to the surface of the Job Seekers sub-topic. (Look for the short list in the lower left rail.) We will refresh the list periodically.

We’re pulling these tips from a growing reservoir of practical ideas resulting from Project Compass’ reach through its workshops and programs. If you have sipped from the short list and are eager for more, here are 3 sources:

• 60 (plus) Ways Libraries Can Help Job Seekers: these ideas were all generated by Project Compass trainers working in a handful of the most economically hard-hit states.
• 56 Things you (your library) can do for workforce renewal: many of the ideas in the “60-plus” document, but presented in PowerPoint slides and organized by themes.
• Online Workshop #1 Resource Summary: through their lively exchanges in the forums, participants in the first Project Compass online workshop contributed a host of ideas and resources to address basic computer skills training and to meet the needs of job seekers.

The good ideas keep flowing Project Compass-way. Look for the summary from workshop #2 in early August—it’s focused on support for entrepreneurs and financial literacy. We’re also getting great survey feedback from over 1000 library staff who have participated in f2f workshops. Stay tuned.

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that we started the simplification by paring down the home page to the most popular content. Our next target has been the discussion boards. When we relaunched the new version of WebJunction.org in 2008, we experimented with decentralizing the forums so that there was a separate board for each topic, scattered throughout the website. The idea was that visitors to the website would be looking for resources on a topic, navigate there, and then explore the variety of content formats to get the answers they need, including forums. It may have been an interesting concept, but forum software was not built to be used that way, and we stretched the feature beyond its practical capacity. Visitors have had a hard time finding the discussions and, more importantly, keeping up with the activity there.

So, we have consolidated most of the discussion forums to three main areas:

• Technology
• Library Management
• Library Services

If you click any of the three tabs on the top WebJunction menu for those areas, you will see the related discussions right on the page. No need to drill down any further for subtopics.

We also took the opportunity to do some weeding of the boards, which have been accumulating content since 2004. We moved only those threads with recent activity (basically, posts in 2011) to their new location. We archived the older threads.

There are some additional places you will find discussion forums:

• Workforce Resources – these threads related to serving job seekers and the unemployment have been kept as a stand-alone topic for the time being, while our Project Compass work is still in full swing
• Group pages – the discussions hosted by member groups are still on those pages
• Getting Started – forum for support using WebJunction
• State Library Partner discussions – forums that are hosted on the state-specific versions of WebJunction have not been moved.