Sunday, July 18, 2010

Jumping in. The water's fine, but the cat's on my keyboard.

Here is my first assignment for 21 Things--making a blog. Actually, I've wanted to do this for several years now, but never thought I had anything much to say. As you can probably tell from the title of this blog, I'm firmly ensconced in "middle age" and am not used to putting my opinions out there. Having been home for almost 20 years raising children, I became a children's/ teen librarian almost 5 years ago and am really enjoying this next career.
Our first assignment was to consider technology. I remember being around four years old and sitting on our porch typing on a tin typewriter. Fast-forward to 1973 and I learned to use a magnetic-tape Selectric typewriter (by IBM). While I was home raising children, I dabbled with the computer and in library school I learned to use it more proficiently. This is the next step.
I work for a county library system, so we have certain boundaries to which we must adhere. I opened a Twitter account to let our teens know what was happening, but wasn't comfortable putting anything on it. Around October of last year our system tried sending text alerts about branch programming. I was find with the 140 character limit, but I don't think many kids used it and the program was scrapped. We are also now working with Evanced Solutions, and where
it may be helpful in some libraries with the SRP bookkeeping, I feel rather plus/minus about it for our branch.