One great benefit of TLA is seeing so many other librarians from around the state. I have met several librarians that I first met last year in Austin. It seems that everyone has bags and carts full of free stuff and are beginning to look a bit tired. Me too!!
I started today at the Technology Sampler Platter workshop present by David Whelan from the Cincinnati Law Library Association. Kudos to David for making technology understandable and interesting to those of us non-techie's. I overheard several people saying how great of a presenter David was - which unfortunately is not always the case! Anyway, I haven't had much time to explore tech sites that he shared, but plan to look at Plone - a Content Management System, and Open Source Systems for Libraries to stay abreast of developments with integrated systems and Open Source. It is hard to make it sound exciting here, but this is really beneficial information for libraries.
At the Leaders in Libraries workshop, David Bendekovic shared tools on assessing yourself and your library. At first, we took a quick overview of our leadership style - I am "Human Resource", which is a leader that thinks people first. The other three types of leadership styles were Structural - all about logic, facts and data; Political - the importance is building networks and allies; and Symbolic - the main task is providing vision and inspiration.
He also challenged us to look at the library's mission statement - and make it short enough to fit on a t-shirt. All staff should know the mission by heart. He gave several corporate mission statements as examples of being short, but powerful such as Disney's - We're here to make you smile.
My day finished with the presentation by actress Marlee Matlin - very inspiring! We all count and we need to be the library for everyone!
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