Last week I attended the Maryland Library Association annual conference in Ocean City.
At this conference, after two years of preliminary activities, the Blue Crab committee that I was on reached it’s final destination; the Blue Crab author talk conference session and presenting the award plaque to the author of the award winning book. It was our turn to invite the fiction authors and Wong Herbert Yee (Mouse and Mole series, Fireman Small series and many others) graciously accepted our invitation and traveled to Ocean City from Detroit, Michigan to receive the award.
Besides my Blue Crab duties, I heard Phyllis Reynolds Naylor receive the Maryland Author Award and give a beautiful and moving speech. She and I both live in Gaithersburg and I think I’ve seen her in the grocery store.
In the general session, Paul Holdengraber told about his amazing, dynamic program series called Live from NYPL in which he interviews a high profile public person or invites one person to interview another with very interesting results. He’s had some amazing match-ups. He aims to give the ‘talent’ a chance to do something different from what they usually do; make it interesting for them and an interesting interaction will follow.
He’s a lover of obituaries and the essay form and mentioned an interesting/odd book I’ve recently read(listened to) called, How to Talk about Books You Haven’t Read by Pierre Bayard, which of course we all do all the time to some extent.
His recommendations for programming are to know your distinct community, who they are, what they want, start a collection of customer emails right now and use (sparingly) to announce upcoming events, have one or two big stars at the beginning of a series. Find an artist in residence – one way to give your events an afterlife. Partnering is essential – we can’t do big things alone.
(“Digression is the sunshine of communication’)
Emerging Technologies Librarians – Three staff with this title have been hired in the last year at the Cook Library of Towson University. They presented strategies for launching a successful blog. Their blog, librarytechtalk.wordpress.com was started to acquaint the Cook Library staff with new technologies and how they can be used in the library. They have opened their blog to outside readers, so you can go to the above website to subscribe.
Among their recommendations when starting a blog – make it engaging, interesting, and relevant, fill a need (instruct, inform, educate or entertain), define the scope, know your audience, market, and evaluate.
The Heart of Maryland Libraries Quilt is beautiful! The MCPL square shows the word ‘welcome’ is many languages similar to what you see on the glass entrance to Rockville library. Great job, Carol L., Ginger W., Beth I. and Anne G. Overall the quilt is stunning. It will travel to some upcoming events, visit the contributing libraries and then be on display at MLA headquarters in Baltimore.
