The 80/20 Librarian: Focusing on the 20% that matters

I really like turnaround stories and I saw an especially inspirational one come across the ALA Twitter Feed earlier this week. For those that have not looked at the Preston Hollow Advocate’s story about the great progress at the Marsh Middle School Library in the Dallas metro area you should look at the story http://prestonhollow.advocatemag.com/2012/02/24/marsh-middle-students-take-back-their-library/. Photojournalist Danny Fulgencio talks to the head librarian Mary Virginia Meeks about the turnaround efforts and the video is included in the web article. Both students and the library staff pitched in to make the library a welcoming place and according to the article circulation has jumped 150 % from two years ago and 260 students use the library each day. The actions that lead to the transformation include the elimination of student fines, grassroots efforts to obtain funding, and students who worked to renovate the library by cleaning and painting. This is a great article indeed.

I also really liked the story on the CBS Philly website by Cherri Greg see http://philadelphia.cbslocal.com/2012/02/29/a-west-philadelphia-public-school-gets-a-better-library-thanks-to-literacy-group/. In this article a literacy group called West Philadelphia Alliance for Children is noted as playing a key role in opening 12 libraries in the south and southwest parts of the city. This is an inspirational article to read.

I caught this Village Voice blog article by Sam Levin (written on February 21, 2012) as it came across the ALA Twitter feed this week. The article does a great job of articulating how political support for libraries can be achieved if libraries are able to align their missions with the current needs of their wider community. In this instance the need for job and career search assistance is vital so libraries are playing a key role in this venture. The article does a good job explaining the partnership between the library system and  NYC’s workforce career centers, partnership which NYC Mayor Bloomberg launched. Last year the partnership helped NYC residents land 35,000 jobs.

I am placing a link to the article below.

http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2012/02/mike_bloomberg_45.php

In one of the the Public Libraries magazine issues from 2011 I saw an article about Rebecca Vnuk’s blog which discusses different books.

I will place a link to the blog here below.

http://shelfrenewal.com/

I was just looking through the American Libraries November/December 2011 magazine and saw a note about a blog by Monty Joynes praising librarians. I will place the link here below if you want to check it out.

http://writingasaprofession.wordpress.com/2011/09/01/in-praise-of-librarians/

Hello There! Please see my welcome video message below. Just click the play button to start.

I just realized that there are many people out there who have created blogs. However, I was initially concerned that I would not have the technical ability to get a simple blog going. What has in part been a bit of an inspiration to me are those groups of people that I would not normally consider the traditional tech savvy types who have ventured off into the blogging world. I would stereotypically have thought that those in religious life would not have gotten into web 2.0 technology, but I was completely wrong.

For example take the website that the Jesuits have. The URL is http://www.jesuit.org/blog/

This is a website that is rich in its collection of text, video, twitter, and blogs. The website is a great example of the use of web 2.0 technologies.

So if the Jesuits can do utilize web 2.0 technologies, then with some effort and know-how I can also use them.

All of us can learn if we want to.

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