ALA photos

Photos from ALA’s Library Day at the Hill

LSO’s Flickr account

LSO receives award at ALA

Also, search Flickr with keywords :SIRLS, LSO, ALA

LSO Presented with Student Chapter of the Year Award!

ALA Conference: Come Celebrate with LSO!

SIRLS Celebration @ ALA Annual Conference 2007 (visit our calendar)

There will be two chances to celebrate the accomplishments of our LSO Chapter this year at ALA. Both will take place on Sunday evening, June 24th, at the Grand Hyatt Hotel.

First: SIRLS LSO receives the coveted ‘Chapter of the Year Award’ from ALA

What: The ‘New Members Round Table’ (NMRT) Student Reception will host the LSO Chapter of the Year celebration.
Where: Grand Hyatt Hotel, Lafayette Park Room
When: 6:30-7:30 PM, Sunday June 24, 2007
Who: SIRLS students, alumni, and friends and colleagues attending ALA are invited!

This NMRT reception will welcome library school students and guests to network in a relaxed environment and learn more about ALA units from their representatives. The Student Chapter of the Year Award will be presented and light refreshments will be served. Attendees will need to show their ALA conference badges at the door.

Then: SIRLS meet-up to immediately follow the NMRT Reception
What: SIRLS meet-up at the NMRT/3M party. There will be a buffet dinner and drinks either at the party or in the cocktail lounge (last year there were 2 free drink tickets; free drink tickets have not been confirmed for this year though they’re likely)
Where: Grand Hyatt Hotel, Independence A ballroom
When: 7:30-11:30 PM, Sunday June 24, 2007
Who: SIRLS students, alumni, friends, and colleagues attending ALA are invited. We’ll continue to celebrate LSO’s accomplishments and their Chapter of the Year Award immediately following the NMRT student reception at the Grand Hyatt. Attendees will need to show their ALA conference badges at the door, and participation is free with ALA attendance. The SIRLS group will walk from the Lafayette Park room to the Independence A ballroom as a group, or you can meet the SIRLS group there.

If you have any questions, please contact SIRLS Assistant Director Leslie Kent Kunkel at lkunkel@email.arizona.edu.

D.C. Bound!

Please consider donating to help fund LSO officers’ trips to ALA Annual in Washington, D.C., this summer. Those that have held office in LSO during the past year will be attending to accept the Student Chapter of the Year Award!
D.C. Bound
Even a little bit helps! Encourage your friends and colleagues to support this cause. Find out more information here.

LSO Wins Student Chapter of the Year Award!!

Wonderful News!

We have received the New Member’s Roundtable (NMRT) Student Chapter of the Year Award! This is truly an honor and recognizes all the hard work of LSO officers and members from the past year. A job well done to everyone in making our organization truly proactive, collaborative, and innovative. We will be honored at the NMRT Reception during ALA Annual in Washington, D.C. this summer. A travel grant of $1000 has been awarded to LSO and further details will be sent out to the listserv.

A quote from the award letter:

“We received many strong applications this year, and your chapter’s selection is a tribute to your past year of accomplishments and hard work. Congratulations! The committee applauds University of Arizona’s hard work in membership recruitment and retention efforts… We also were impressed by your class liaison concept and the strength of your communication with your members. The teleconferencing of meetings was especially innovative and helps to make students at other campuses feel more involved. Your programming was excellent and we were impressed by the use of PayPal for dues, and by the Graduate Student Symposium Grant that you secured.”

It’s truly an honor to be a part of this fantastic organization! Congratulations to all!!

Back From Seattle

So, I am back from the ALA Midwinter in Seattle and like Beth stated in her entry, this “little” conference was indeed overwhelming, especially for a first time ALA conference attendee. If it wasn’t for the fact that Beth and some of the other LSO and SIRLS students were there to guide me, I would have probably spent my time staring at the tall buildings and trying to decipher the Midwinter schedule in an effort to select which events to attend and what exhibits to see.

Though they didn’t have a whole lot of exhibits geared specifically towards students, they offered a look into some of the different things that are being touted to libraries right now. Gaming is huge with young adult/teen users so something that must be mentioned (I know Beth loves ‘em) are DDR and Guitar Hero, two hot market items that some public libraries are adding to their teen media centers.

As for the sessions, what really stood out for me was the OCLC panel discussion on social software. They discussed the implications of social software for the profession and emphasized the need for librarians to embrace digital networking tools so that they can use these tools to better serve their users. David Lee King talked about the way digital tools can really help libraries that are outgrowing their physical space by giving them “digital space”. He has already put this in to practice by creating a digital library for the Topeka and Shawnee County Public Library. He’s very emphatic about librarians using social software to their advantage and basically said that rather than libraries waiting for users to show up, librarians can market their libraries to their communities via social software. I can see his point too: if teenagers are spending most of their time on myspace, flickr, and second life, what better way for a library to reach them than on their own turf! Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe mentioned the way that, at least within her library, on-line encounters with users last longer than what she calls the “one off encounter”, those that occur face to face at the reference desk. She said many online patrons will carry on lengthy dialogues with a librarian via computer; whereas most patrons physically present at the library will usually just ask a specific question of the person at the reference desk, and that would be the extent of the interaction. She uses myspace and second life to market her library to undergraduate students at the University of Illinois at Urbana. Check out their myspace here. It was interesting to me to listen to these librarians talk in such an enthusiastic and positive way about technologies that make it easier for users to avoid the physical library. I think it just goes to show that the profession really is evolving to a more tech driven one. Social software tools are definitely some of the cooler ways for librarians to interact with, and provide information to, their users

Going along with the discussion of technology, Jenny Levine emphasized the importance of gaming to reach teen users, and how she and other librarians are implementing such tools into the library’s collections. Speaking of which, while wondering through the exhibits we suddenly lost our webmaster, Beth Hoffman, to a DDR dance off against non other than Jenny Levine herself; followed by some wicked shredding on Guitar Hero. You are MY guitar HERO, BETH!

Seattle Impressions

Greetings from Seattle and ALA Midwinter Conference!

There are several of us from LSO here, and I hope some of the other folks will blog their impressions too (hint, hint).

This is my second library conference and my first ALA conference – and boy is it a change from Internet Librarian. The conference is HUGE (and this is the “little” ALA conference). Huge to the point of being overwhelming. I’ve had fun, but it’s harder to find my way around and to figure out what sessions I can get to and so forth. That, coupled with the fact that all of the sessions I want to go to seem to be scheduled at the same time, means that I’ve spent rather more time wandering around Seattle and enjoying the sights than I’ve spent in sessions.

I’ve been to a couple of really good sessions though. The OCLC Symposium on the social implications of social networking software was excellent, and although I’m not going to go into detail about the session, I will say this: If you’re at all interested in this sort of thing, you need to be reading danah boyd’s blog, apophenia.

The presentation on Social Software: Best Practices for Libraries was also good, and although it wasn’t aimed directly at groups like LSO, it did give me a couple of good ideas….

But even though I haven’t been to a lot of sessions, I still think it’s been worth it to come here, for an entirely other reason: Networking. I got to see friends I’d made at Internet Librarian, and I’ve gotten to meet a bunch of new folks too. I’ve gotten a couple of tips on jobs to apply for now that I’m nearing graduation, which is cool.

Oh, and I also got to play Dance Dance Revolution and Guitar Hero at the ALA TechSource booth, and I’m making it a personal mission to get some of the other LSO folks to join the fun before we all come home. (Who says conferences have to be all about boring meetings?)