TLA Highlights

I had a good conference last week. With all the walking I did, I believe I lost an extra pound.

Here are the highlights of the week for me.

Tuesday
At the Texas State Library and Archives Commission, the commission considered changes to the FY2009 budget. This budget revision included a $300,000 reduction for the Systems program, which translates to a $489,000 budget for NTRLS. The commission approved the budget modifications as presented.

Wednesday
I was pleased to facilitate a program on Learning 2.0 by Helene Blowers, who is the developer of the program and currently works at the Columbus Metropolitan Library in Ohio. She gave a wonderful presentation on the topic. If you are not familiar with the concept, I will let Helene describe it. It is “an online discovery program designed to encourage library staff to learn about emerging web 2.0 technologies (blogs, wikis, podcasts, etc) and other user-centric tools that are changing the way users and libraries communicate, collaborate and share information.” Her presentation is available on her LibraryBytes blog. The NTRLS staff will be doing the training during the month of May. Helene is coming back in June to do a NTRLS workshop. Check ntrls.org for more details.

Thursday
I attended the TSLAC Resource Sharing Task Force meeting. I was so impressed with what the taskforce is attempting to do that I volunteered to be co-chair of the taskforce. I will be sharing this responsibility with Richard Wood, Executive Director of Libraries of the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center Libraries of the Health Sciences. For those who have not heard, the taskforce will come up with a new model for Interlibrary Loan in Texas. The taskforce will be using a recent study as a guide in its efforts. My main interest in the project, of course, is how Systems can play a role in the new model. I will keep everyone up-to-date on what transpires.

I attended the District 7 meeting to request a partnership with them. As many of you know, NTRLS is moving towards a multi-type system. District 7 is already serving multi-type libraries so instead of NTRLS duplicating programs and services; we are going to build on the inherent synergy between the two organizations. I will write about our efforts in this arena in a future blog posting.