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Last week Nancy Pearl was in town for the 50th anniversary of the Southern Adirondack Library System and gave a delightful talk at their annual dinner. She also presented several other programs, including a session on readers advisory for children & teens. And even though I’ve never done any real RA work, the librarians I work with do. Going to events like this helps me keep a bit better in touch with the real world of libraries! Little did I know that I’d learn so much in that hour. Nancy’s framework for looking at the appeal of books is so elegantly effective, yet simple enough for my non-literary brain to wrap itself around.

I won’t attempt to write up my notes since my good friend and librarian extraordinaire, Sue Rokos, did such a great writeup.

Some excerpts from Sue’s excellent post.

… every book of narrative fiction and non-fiction fits
at least one of Nancy Pearl’s four potential doorways through which
readers enter a book:Doorway # 1 is Story

(more…)

Food for Thought is an innovative one day learning program for campus staff at RIT:

A full day of learning sessions on a variety of topics that range from application-specific workshops,
to explorations of technology trends, to how-to instruction,
as well as some uniquely fun diversions are being planned.

Participants can pick from 24 workshops scheduled throughout the day. The day also include lunchtime brown bag sessions, lightning talks and an ‘Extra Helpings’ one-on-one help service. What an impressive program.

Read all the details about how the event came about and how it was implemented in Janie Hermann’s interview with RIT’s Jon Jiras on the Library Garden blog. Another program idea to think about stealing! Thanks to Janie and Jon for sharing all this information.

This is terrific - an online learning opportunity for library customers modeled after Helene Blowers’ Learning 2.0 projects. A Baker’s Dozen – 13 Web 2.0 Technologies from Arlington Heights (IL) Memorial Library

You may have seen the phrase “social networking,” along with mention of sites such as MySpace and FaceBook. Do you watch or even upload videos to YouTube? Do you read blogs and subscribe to RSS feeds? Maybe you’ve added some photos to Flickr. All of the aforementioned sites are part of the Web 2.0 craze.

Please join AHML for the next year and 1 month for a Baker’s Dozen; each month this series will highlight a Web 2.0 topic and tool as well as feature a brief assignment (designed to take no more than a few minutes). (About Baker’s Dozen)

What a great idea. Yay to the staff of AHML for providing this opportunity. It will be interesting to watch as the 13 months unfold.

(via: Tame the Web)

Wish I’d noticed this earlier today (Wednesday) but there’s still time to get this screencasting software for free through Giveaway of the Day.

Wondershare DemoCreator is a screen recording software package similar to Wink. I haven’t tested it out thoroughly, but after a brief test I can say I’m impressed. Glad to have a chance to get it for free, though this is one I might pay to upgrade.

In any case grab it while you can!

Installing it took a few tries. Here’s what worked for me:

– run activate.exe
– run setup.exe
– run activate.exe again

And on my Vista computer I had to run setup.exe again to get rid of the “demo only” banner that appeared in my screencast.

It was fairly intuitive to use, I created a short demo video of my browser window in about 5 minutes.  Looks like it has lots of basic features. I don’t imagine it has everything that Camtasia and Captivate have, but this may be enough for many purposes.

The new Vado pocket video camera from Creative Labs looks like a rival to the popular Flip video cam. Slightly lighter and thinner than the Flip, it also has a slightly larger LCD. The Vado has 2GB of memory, the same as the Flip Video Ultra, but at a list price of $99 it’s $50 cheaper. Check out this review at Digital Inspiration.

Making quizzes just keeps getting easier and more fun. studiyo has a great interface that lets you create multiple choice quizzes and easily embed them in your blog or other web page. Quizzes can include images, video, and text. Other options include: choice of layout, addition of your own logo, feedback from users, different endings depending on scores and the option to let users add their own questions.