Tour Heli landing in Downtown Skagway

Tour Heli landing in Downtown Skagway
Originally uploaded by AlaskanLibrarian
I wanted to share what I thought was a lucky shot. I got this photo thanks to Dyea Dave’s Skagway Tour.
Plus, this photo shows the power of image stabilization, without which this caffeine junkie couldn’t take a single good photo owing to his [...]

AkLA 2007: Embrace Customers, Abandon Victimhood

This is the last of my postings about the 2007 Alaska Library Association annual conference held February 22-25 in Juneau, Alaska. Appropriately, it is a posting about our endnote.
The talk was titled Reinventing the Customer-Centered Library: 12 new steps for 2007. The presenter was Karen Hyman (hyman AT sjrlc.org) of the South Jersey Regional Library [...]

AkLA 2007: Getting Spacey With Georgine

Sunday February 25, I attended this AkLA session:
New trends and authors in science fiction. Georgine Olson
Even for long-time readers of SF, things are changing rapidly. Here’s a quick overview to help you keep up with (or ahead of ) your fans (especially the 20-30 somethings who regard authors like Ray Bradbury and Ursula Le Guin [...]

AkLA 2007: Want a good OPAC? Talk to Darla!

A short but interesting program at the 2007 Alaska Library Association annual conference was a brief demo of the Bering Strait School District (BSSD)’s Koha based Intergrated Library System ILS. The public catalog is available online.
Presenter Darla Grediagin (dgrediagin@bssd.org) said that using Koha, an open source library catalog, had dropped her annual ILS maintainance [...]

AkLA 2007 - Why Pay Money?

Mike Robinson of University of Alaska at Anchorage did a very nice show and tell about open source software for home and library.
I think the presentation lived up to his blurb:
“There are a lot of great open source applications that are perfect for libraries. This session will cover range of software packages from nifty tools [...]

AkLA 2007 - The Unshelved Guys

The keynote speakers at the 2007 Alaska Library Association conference were the “Unshelved Guys”, Bill Barnes and Gene Ambaum. I was laughing too hard for most of their presentation, especially after their “Unshelved Library Simulator” to take great notes, but here are some impressions and funny quotes.
“Librarians prefer the shadows”, Gene Ambaum, explaining why he [...]

Econ 101 by OCLC Western

One of the talks I attended at the Alaska version of the OCLC Western Users Group Meeting was Econ 101, presented by Pamela Bailey.
A few points out of this interesting talk:
Discussions about library economics revolve around:

Public value versus public good
Justifying our costs
Defining our worth

[...]

Snapshots Alaska by OCLC Western

While attending OCLC Western User Group meeting for Alaska, I attended a presentation by Margi Mann called “Snapshots Alaska.”
As you might have guessed, it was a lot of statistics about libraries in Alaska. They were presented in a quiz format which kept interest high throughout Margi’s presentation.
Here are some highlights:
According to OCLC, Alaska libraries have [...]

AkLA 2007 - Where People and Libraries Intersect

For the next several days, I’ll be posting about events related to the 2007 Alaska Library Association conference being held in Juneau.
The next few entries will relate to the OCLC Western User Group Meeting for Alaska that was held February 21st. If you have a chance to go to one of the remaining meetings, I’d [...]