Library Snapshot Day at the SD State Library

The South Dakota State Library is celebrating Library Snapshot Day on Thursday, November 4th. The week of October 31st to November 6th has been set aside for libraries in SD to gather information about what they do all day. The information gathered will be used to demonstrate the importance of libraries in South Dakota communities, school districts, and higher education.

SDSL will be hosting light snacks and coffee in the main lobby that day, and staff invites all SD state employees and Pierre citizens to stop up between 10-4. While you enjoy your refreshements, you can:

• meet your librarians
• take a tour
• get a library card
• learn more about the services available to you at your State Library

Join us on Thursday, November 4th!

Library Snapshot Day is an initiative promoted by the American Library Association and the South Dakota State Library for ALL types of libraries. Using Library Snapshot Day, we want to demonstrate the impact that each library has, on a local and statewide level.

SDLA 2010

I'm about to leave for the 2010 South Dakota Library Association conference, where I, along with a co-worker, will be doing a presentation on setting up library policies and procedures. In addition, we will be facilitating a panel discussion on building library websites. It will be a great conference this year with the Unshelved Guys www.unshelved.com, the Awful Library Books bloggers http://awfullibrarybooks.net, and Vicki Myron, author of Dewey www.deweyreadmorebooks.com.

Reference Renaissance 2010

Reference Renaissance 2010: Inventing the Future was held August 8-10 at the Denver Marriott Tech Center.

By attending RefRen 2010, I hoped to hear great speakers on an international level, and get ideas on the future of library reference work. After the first day, I was ready to implement some of what I’d learned. Keynote speaker Andrew Walsh from the UK started the conference with a prediction that the smartphone will be what the future will build around and that desktops, laptops, and handheld computers will be used less and less in favor of the smartphone. He also talked about QR Codes and how these are becoming more used as technology advances. Walsh encouraged librarians to change their signs at the door: toss the sign that basically says ‘no cell phone use’ and replace it with a sign that says ‘cell phone use allowed; please turn sound to silent’.

I learned a lot about web based reference statistics, LibGuides, library services and generational research. Did you know that those born between 1988-1994 (the youngest of the millenials) are also being referred to as the 'screenagers'? Marie L. Radford surmises that the future of reference work will include a lot of merging services, work shifting, outreach, and working from places that are not your traditional library setting. It won't be so much "go to your library", but "go to your librarian" and your librarian could be 'virtually' anywhere.

There were 318 attendees from 39 states, as well as many from Canada. Attending a national conference is so important for obtaining ideas and making contacts that one cannot do at a state conference. Reference Renaissance was a wonderful opportunity to do just that, and was worth paying my own way and taking the time to go. I am hopeful that the conference will continue to exist as BCR (the major sponsor) is closing operations. The organizers are looking for a new host, and I hope they find one, as I will plan to attend the next RefRen conference and will highly recommend it to other librarians in South Dakota.

The value of one on one training

Training is imperative in almost any professsion, and finding a venue for learning in which everyone can benefit is sometimes the biggest challenge. Training opportunities exist via many different avenues: webinars, conferences, large or small group hands-on, large or small group lecture style, or one on one. Although one benefits regardless of the type of training by gaining information that they did not have previously, I always appreciate the added value of one on one training.

A colleague and I just returned from such an opportunity and it was great! Being able to sit with one or two others, watch someone go through the material, and be able to ask questions whenever one popped into our heads was a great way for us to gain knowledge. As one librarian pointed out, it is harder to ask questions in a larger group setting for fear that everyone else in the room knows the answer except for you. Even though there is no such thing as a dumb question, it is much easier to ask those questions when there are fewer ears and eyes in the room.

We are happy to have had the opportunity to travel to Brookings, visit with the SDSU librarians, tour the university library, and tour the public library as well. It was time well spent!

This book is overdue!

I recently started reading This book is overdue: how librarians and cybrarians can save us all by Marilyn Johnson. Being in SD, I particularly enjoyed the description of the Deadwood PL at the beginning. It is also nice to know that library consortiums in other states have had nightmare experiences when migrating to a new system. I've only just finished chapter 3, but I can tell this book will be worth my wait in the hold queue.

Wrap-Up

Great wrap-up, ERC's! Way to highlight all of the extra goodies on the SDSL website. Librarians don't need to create handouts, etc, because you guys have done it all for them!

I would have to say my biggest discovery were the resources that I have not used before (ArchiveGrid and CAMIO) and also being able to get a little more practice with the Gale Virtual Reference Library. I think sometimes patrons get so overwhelmed with the number of databases out there that it's hard to remember what there is to search. If I can't find it here, then I can always try there. I can only imagine the number of databases large academic librarians have to keep track of. I think the SDSL offers a good number of databases covering a nice variety of areas.

I've already had a chance to plug Learning Express Library to a patron, and am planning on plugging the rest of the databases covered in the challenge and more when I visit the Capital University Center classes this fall. When I give an overall presentation to state agency employees, I include a large variety of our databases to highlight. Even though state employees may not necessarily use World Book or Learning Express in their daily jobs, I can usually catch their interest when I ask if they've got kids in grade school, high school, or college. There really is something for everyone.

Ancestry etc.

1. I found myself via my maiden name in the U.S. Phone and Address Directories, but I do not exist in the census records via maiden or married names.

2. Found my paternal grandfather in the death index and right underneath that was the record of my grandparents marriage, so that was cool. I made a copy for my dad.

3. Lots of neat digitized images of people, places, and pages from books that mention South Dakota

4. It took a while of playing around, but I finally got some interesting hits when I did a search for Fort Pierre in the places section. Doane Robinson's encyclopedia of South Dakota as well as his A brief history of South Dakota are both full text in Heritage Quest.

5. I am starting to recognize some of the old buildings in Pierre, but probably not enough to pinpoint what they are now to what they were back in 1884. On one of the 1927 Pierre maps, the HWY 14/34 bridge that now crosses the river next to the railroad bridge was called the Wagaon Bridge. It is interesting to see how cities grow over the years by starting with the first year available and then checking the last year available. When I worked at RC Public Library, we had a lot of people come in to look at the Deadwood Sanborn maps as they were researching historic preservation areas and the old Chinese laundry buildings.