Read Joyce Valenza’s Manifesto for 21st Century Librarians. When does that woman sleep???? But I love her – she is up on everything and so generously shares it with everyone. That’s who I want to be when I grow up. I like her ideas about an information landscape (it’s out there!) and expanding the idea of collection developement to include all kinds of media. I’ve learned so many ways to collaborate (Thanks, Polly and Joyce!) now. Just think, did we know any of this 10 years ago? (I did not! but how much fun were Inanimate Alice or the Moving Tales? How did I miss that?) I do some of the things she suggests we’ll all be doing: lending cameras, laptops, flash sticks – for those who need them, I can help to level that playing field a little – and I expand my hours in the afternoons (unpaid, natch) so kids who need ’em can use our computers. I try to use my website to ‘organize the web’ so kids can find good info and not get bogged down in rotty old links – of course, I hope they read, look at my displays (physical and virtual), evaluate everything and build knowledge. But there’s so much more for me to learn and do – full employment forever in the information industry! And what will we be doing five or ten years from now? I don’t know but I know I will keep learning about it! I felt this way when I first studied children’s lit. I thought I had read a lot of books – but boy-oh-boy did my knowledge base expand – expand, heck, try explode! That was the first time I felt like my course grade didn’t matter since my learning was so extreme. It was like I could feel my brain growing!
Thanks, PollyAlida – great resources and your depth of knowledge is astounding. Glad to be part of this and I still want to keep digging deeper into what we’ve done. I think I could keep going on this for a long time.
bookletting 