silence and graduation

It has been a quiet spring here on the green librarian blog.

I have to say it has not been for lack of material or issues (I see things in the world every day that give me green hope). I was in the tight grips of my last quarter at the University of Washington iSchool, struggling to reach out to Latinos in the community, and was consumed by a few ultimately unsuccessful employment leads.

I graduated from the iSchool with a Masters in Library and Information Science on Saturday June 14, 2008. I've been a grad student there longer than I have been a mommy and am now officially library schooled-out (thanks Pam for the t-shirt!).

My personal and professional goals for the summer are many. I want to jump on local opportunities for library employment, continue to excel as a Library Assistant at the Bozeman Public Library, and ramp up the effort to bring Gallatin County's Latino community into the public library.

For this blog my goal is to post on at least one green librarian related issue a week and give people a reason to come visit me here online again. I've had a few interesting inquiries from blog readers over the last few months and I'll finally be able to respond to them here (I'm sorry to have kept you waiting). I'm going to incorporate some book reviews of green literature here in the future as well.

Personally I am looking forward to being just a mommy and a professional. I know I will not regret taking the student out of that equation. I am already collecting fabric for a great quilt idea, have started baking all of our bread, and Patrick and I planted a mini garden (a watermelon and cucumber mound) right out our front door. I won't even tell you about the stack of books I've got waiting for me (I'm reading I Am America and So Can You right now just to enjoy the pure pleasure of reading trash).

Expect to see more of me here online in the coming months, I hope to see more of you too, that is what comments and discussion are for. If you start your own blog let me know, and I'll gladly come visit you there.

I have to say I am already enjoying the short Montana summer.

badge it! --- playing make believe

What a fun little exercise for the second part of Flickr week for the Montana Library 2.0 Challenge! Can you guess what construction site I'm overseeing? This is one of my favorite "professional" pictures, circa 2006. Make your own badge!

flickr and libraries

Week four of the Montana Library 2.0 Challenge asks participants to explore and discover Flickr, the ever popular photo sharing site.

I use Flickr for many purposes, from sharing family photos with distant grandparents, to promoting libraries through the 365 Library Days Project, to creating presentations like the Making of a Day in the Life of a Youth Services Librarian. Flickr has quickly become a part of my life every day, both professionally and personally.

Last week I traveled to Missoula, MT to give a Connecting to Spanish Speakers @ Your Library Workshop to local librarians in the area and then attend the Montana Library Association's annual Offline conference. I was away from my toddler for a few days and missed viewing the recent lunar eclipse with him and my husband. Later that night, back at the hotel I could quickly view the photos my husband had taken of my son pointing out the disappearing moon on Flickr. For my son's grandparents, being able to see updated photos almost instantly keeps them closely connected even from 1,000 miles away.

The 365 Library Days Project is also very much worth your time to check out and explore. Michael Porter (the Library Man) from WebJunction, I believe, hatched this idea and is even in the process of creating a Press kit for libraries to use to promote themselves and the project.

RSS Feeds

This is week 3 of the Montana Library 2.0 Challenge (at least it is for me). This week we discuss and explore RSS feeds and readers. Before today I had only used the reader on IE but today I set up Google Reader. So now dear readers you can not only read what I'm blogging about, you can also see what I'm reading about. On the right side of the blog is a What am I reading about? feed as well as a What am I blogging about? list of tags.

Some of my favorite feeds are:
365 Days Library Days Project Photo Pool
A Librarian's Guide to Etiquette
Worldchanging
The Dispersal of Darwin
What are some of your favorite feeds? Post in the comments, please.

plastic bags: the immortality of humankind?

I'm feeling a little anti-plastic-baggy tonight and wanted to share this video and some blogging on the issue:

Small-scale film work of Brian Liloia: "The Immortality of Man"

Bag it Beagle Style ... from Michael Barton's (my husband) the "Dispersal of Darwin" blog.

San Francisco, China, Africa, Ireland... have all taken steps to ban, charge for, and/or discourage plastic bag use. Could Bozeman take this on and work to become plastic bag free?

You can also support the library at the same time and buy a sturdy canvas Bozeman Public Library book bag for only $15.00 in the Friends of the Library/Wild Joe's Coffee Shop. I use canvas bags to shlep all kinds of stuff; books, groceries, my son's toys, etc. I try to keep canvas bags in the car so I'm never without. Personally, I know I still need to cut down on (cut out) my plastic bag use...

Finally I wanted to share a new blog I've been reading "Live Lightly, Read Wildy: A Summer Reading Program the Earth Can Live With" and that blogger, Shannon in Illinois' thoughts on the subject, "Why Ban Plastics in Programs?".

Okay back to honing my plastic-bag-avoidance skills.

"No thank you I don't need a bag. I brought my own."