With all that's been going on, I haven't taken the time to post about my activities, so here's a bit of an update on my fall travels and meetings.
In mid-October, I traveled to Omaha, Nebraska, for the annual meeting of the Chief Officers of State Library Agencies (COSLA). I got to spend a good deal of time with Christie Brandau who is enjoying her tenure as the state librarian of Kansas and spending more time than ever with her growing family. It was great to see her! Part of the focus of the fall annual meeting is always a day of continuing education, and this fall meeting was no different. We heard lively presentations Aaron Smith who focuses on creating user centered libraries; Brewster Kahle who talks about how it's actually possible that all printed content could be digitized and be made accessible online eventually; and J.L. Needham who talked about the necessity of making our resources accessible through the major search engines, because of course, that's where everyone goes to find whatever they seek. Listening to them all was exciting, challenging, and in some ways overwhelming, but they all had upbeat outlooks about the potential for achieving the ends they propose.
In mid- to late October, we had a productive meeting with several Michigan Dept. of Education people, including their federal legislation liaison, staff from their state certification section, and a couple of folks from their office of educational technology. We reviewed the proposed SKILLs legislation that would require, where feasible, the presence of a state certified school librarian in every school. At the COSLA meeting in Omaha, ALA's D.C. office director, Emily Sheketoff noted that, even if the SKILLs legislation does not go through at this point in time, just getting the right language on file is important as a building block for the time when the re-authorization process for NCLB does get underway later. Besides having the discussion between our two Michigan executive departments on how we align on this important topic, we are also building a renewed relationship between the Dept. of Education and the Library of Michigan and HAL, which will serve us well in future joint endeavors as well.
I was glad to have a chance to stop in at the last session of the MAME annual conference in Traverse City where I got to hear Marcia Mardis inspire her audience with an eloquent exhortation to build your programming and projects around what you love to do. Engaging in things by building them around what we are passionate about makes us all more effective than we ever can be by just following the rules and guidelines to perfection. Even though I was there for just an hour or two, the trip was well worth it for me. And, it sounded from all I spoke with there and afterward that the conference was quite a success this year. Congratulations to all concerned.
Just last week, we finally were able to convene once again our group of representatives from varied corners of school librarianship in Michigan involved in working to move school media centers ahead in our state. The marketing media piece that has been under production for so long is now nearing completion,and the updated version of the national guidelines from AASL are on the way in the coming months. Our group got itself re-energized and will be meeting again in March to plan for making presentations on the marketing piece and how endorsement and implementation of the new guidelines will benefit school libraries and students in Michigan to a group of representatives from various educational associations hopefully this coming April.
