GENERAL NEWS: ALISE, South Carolina Book Festival, 5 Things to Do

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

You would have been so proud to see us at ALISE. It was like the conference was designed just for us! Attached is a list of faculty presentations that just wowed everyone. In addition, for the ALA Midwinter meeting Drs. Donna Shannon, Virginia Wallace and Nancy Zimmerman all had governance and leadership roles. We rock!

The major changes proposed to the ALA COA standards are mostly about measurement and semantics. I don't think there is anything substantive to worry about. Of course, we begin our accreditation push again this fall with our visit coming in fall 2009. To help with the process, our National Advisory Council completed their contributions to our school's working plan last Friday at a great meeting. I will take the suggestions for each standard now and add objectives and budget implications then I'll send it back for their approval. When I have the final okay, we'll post the plan to the website and you all can make suggestions and revisions.

NEWBERY & CALDECOTT WINNERS: The writer of a novel about a 10-year-old girl named Lucky who lives in the California desert with her French guardian and the illustrator of a story about the images in a magical camera that washes up on a beach were named respective winners of the ALA’s Newbery and Caldecott medals honoring children’s literature. Susan Patron earned the John Newbery Medal for _The Higher Power of Lucky_, published by Atheneum. David Wiesner took the Randolph Caldecott prize for his masterful watercolors and ingeniously layered marinescapes in _Flotsam_, published by Clarion Books.

I'll be in Virginia recruiting the end of this week and I'm really looking forward to meeting all the good people there. Please don't let it snow. . .

Mark your calendars for February 23 for the start of the South Carolina Book Festival www.scbookfestival.org
and Ms. Helen Fellers assures me that it is the best in the world!

I still haven't see any essays on how libraries transform lives so will give it up for now but I'll be back to it and checking to see if you have posted to the blog! http://fridaymatters.blogspot.com but in the meantime below are 5 things to read, or do or act upon:

1. Toobin, Jeffrey. Google's Moon Shot: The quest for the universal library. The New Yorker. February 5, 2007. Good history of Google and some of the science behind the scanning project. http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/070205fa_fact_toobin

2. Today's leaders juggle e-mails, blogs and integrity [CNN]. "Leaders don't just talk . . .They go out and take action." http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/01/07/pysk.overview/index.html

3. Bibliomania - books as therapy [DailyBulletin.com] * Dr. Walling will like this one!
http://www.dailybulletin.com/entertainment/ci_5101280

4. During the Fall 2006 Dr. John Richardson’s UCLA DIS 245 "Information Access" class created an
Encyclopedia of Reference Services at http://ucla245.pbwiki.com/ quoting: "Our overarching mission was to establish generally accepted referenceprinciples (GARP). Ideally, these pages provide a sense of evidence and showa critical spirit of inquiry. Our audience extends to anyone interested in reference services in the United States and includes practitioners as well as researchers, but especially beginning graduate students in information studies programs who are interested in the research front in this field." What do you think?

5. Libraries struggle with child overload [The Monitor]
http://www.themonitor.com/SiteProcessor.cfm?Template=/GlobalTemplates/Details.cfm&
StoryID=17517&Section=Local


always yours,

sam