Bonnie McKewon, administrator of Northwest Iowa Library Services (NWILS) tells WebJunction how an ongoing slide in funding helped the organization to change how they delivered consultancy services. As budget and staffing shortfalls made clear the impossibility of their current model, they embraced an opportunity to develop an innovative, sustainable virtual-team/consulting model!

The spotlight provides insight into their successful program.

Bonnie is also presenting the WebJunction webinar this week on Thursday January 24, 2008 on the topic of Let’s Collaborate in 2008. She’ll provide suggestions on how to reinvigorate cooperation amongst libraries. Please join us for the webinar or stay tuned for the archive and associated resources.

edit: An archive of Bonnie’s webinar is now available for viewing at your convenience.

Join us for a free, one-hour webinar on December 11th from 10:00-11:00 AM Pacific Time.

This is the best time in the fiscal year to find sources of funding and collaboration. It’s the Holiday season, thoughts turn to human-interest stories and families are gathering to enjoy good times and special memories.

If you have a great program or service you want to implement that will serve the Latino community, and have not secured funding for it yet–we have an opportunity for you! Dr. Camila Alire, my co-author and I will present ideas and tips on how to find funding for programs and services to the Latino community.

In times of challenges to services for the underserved, lack of culturally competent workers, and too often persons in decision making positions that will not support or encourage outreach, one needs a resource that will provide a realistic approach to serving Latinos. If you have read Serving Latino Communities: A How-To-Do-It Manual then you know that Camila and I are sharing our research and passing it on to assist all those willing to reach a most rewarding destination.

Resources of all kinds are necessary to serve any target population. If your aim is to provide the best services to Latinos in your community, the funds to do so will be critical. As you draft your performance goals for work or formulate new year’s resolutions, plan to join us as we share our knowledge and experience. Then take some of these tips and work toward results.

Registration is optional, but if you choose to register and attendthe webinar, you will be entered to win one of two copies we are giving away of Serving Latino Communities: A How-To-Do-It Manual for Librarians. Participants who register AND attend the webinar will also be eligible for a 10% discount on the book from Neal-Schuman Publishers. Select chapters of the book are now available in the Management for Outreacharea of the WebJunction website.

For more information visit Spanish Outreach - In Depth where you’ll find instructions for joining the webinar. I hope you will join us tomorrow. Feel free to post your thoughts, ideas, and comments here before or after the webinar.

Jacqueline Ayala
Principal Librarian
San Diego County Library

Please join Rural Webinar moderator, Brenda Hough and me, Cindi Hickey on Thursday in Live Space at WebJunction. Here are the meeting details:

Thursday, October 25, 2007
11:00 am PT/ 2:00 pm ET
For connection instructions, please visit:
http://webjunction.org/do/DisplayContent?id=13377

Bring your ideas and success stories! We’ll see you there.

P.S. Want a preview? Check out Library As Place, posted by Peter Bromberg at the Library Garden blog.

Posted by Cindi Hickey

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…

Many thanks again to Sarah and Karen for sharing their expertise!

Follow the instructions for getting online. And I hope to see you Wednesday!

And I can’t think of anything more invigorating than a gathering of fellow rural library fans. After every conference, I spend weeks reminiscing about the sessions, the conversations, and the inspiration. But this year really tops them all. WebJunction had the great honor of hosting a gathering of over 180 library staff who work in or for rural libraries across the country. I told you back in May about the folks selected to attend the Rural Forum @ ALA and am now excited to share news of the fantastic presentations, resources and rich discussion coming out of the gathering (and check out the great stuff from last year’s gathering in New Orleans!). We’ll be talking about this year’s highlights during July’s Rural In Focus webinar including the Rural Café (imagine a café filled with 180 librarians brainstorming) and Jana Ponce’s dynamic and inspirational keynote presentation (everyone’s talking about it!).

Oh, and did I mention the pictures?? (Thank you Susan!)