So thrilled to have such great conversations at the ALA Top Tech Trends panel at ALA 2015 in San Francisco!  Library journal did an excellent job of covering the conversation at several different points — please see links below.

Rethinking Privacy at the LITA Top Tech Trends Panel

San Francisco Deets (scroll to bottom for Tech Trends Panel info)

ALA Takeaways (please scroll down)

 

Think you can’t understand your data network?  Well, think again! It’s time for the second round of visits to rural Texas for “You Can Do I.T. – Basic Network Technology Training” where participants share a day filled with fun, adventure and accomplishment, including creating network diagrams and logging into a router — breaking it — and fixing it!

Don’t believe me?  Hear the words of class participants in this nice video produced by my host – the Texas State Library and Archives Commission.

The first round got rave reviews from participants — and I can’t wait for the next round of visits in Tejas!

PS:  The homepage image (also below) shows the sites (with yellow and green pins);  the blue pin shows places where I’ve spoke or presented in Texas (in Austin multiple times — at SXSW and Texas Library Association conferences) and the red dots are my Texas clients.  Yowsa!

 

**Update** Many grateful thanks to LACONi and the Oak Park Public Library for being warm hosts, and especially to tall of the attendees for helping make this such an excellent session!

Looking forward to presenting a “tools you can use” session about SXSW 2015! Carson Block Live! On Libraries and SXSW!

If you’re in the Chi area join us at the Laconi (Learning – Sharing – Networking) event on Friday, June 5 in Oak Park IL!

Program Description:

Carson Block has been a library technologist for 20 years – as a library worker, IT Director and now a Library Technology Consultant.  His passions include leading technology visioning, planning and other activities designed to held build the library’s capacity to serve communities.

Libraries help people, and Carson helps libraries.  It’s that simple!

Libraries and South by Southwest (SXSW)

Library activity at the annual SXSW Interactive and EDU conferences in Austin TX is at a fever pitch!

As a place of convergence, the conferences are a place to learn about and experience new technologies *before* they become mainstream.

Library workers of all disciplines pony up the significant cost to attend SXSW to:

• Evangelize libraries
• And bring back new ideas that they can use

Come learn about both efforts — and ask questions about SXSW!

 

 

 

Yowsa!  I’m getting some very  encouraging response from an article I wrote for the current issue of Public Libraries Magazine!  Here’s one…

“I was blown away by ‘If Books are Our Brand,’ by Carson Block.  It is an outstanding article.  It’s everything I would have written if I was smart enough to do so.  Every e-reader class I teach or every time I demonstrate the e-book catalog, I get that odd sense that I am sending folks further away from the library.  It’s a strange feeling; worse than when we lost $85,000 in funding.  Money will always be a problem; it’s the idea that as library professionals, we feel less relevant–even in a fleeting moment.

The article is dead-on; ‘this is about how market forces could, perhaps unknowingly and without malice, wipe out the public good served by libraries.’  This is exactly what I couldn’t seem to quite ‘get’ when trying to wrap my head around e-books and e-readers and their impact on libraries.

And I agree, ‘knowing how to go forward isn’t a snap,’ but with the issue so succinctly clarified by Mr. Block, it eases my mind a bit and re-enforces my commitment to what I believe is our brand–reading.  Yes, we must ‘have access to the resources and tools in an ever changing world,’ but we must fundamentally champion reading.”

Sharon McRae, Director
Shaler North Hills Library
Glenshaw, PA

http://www.shalerlibrary.org/