#hyperlib
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Keeping the home fires burning : Infinite Learning
Still water may run deep, but what lives in a stagnant pond? Can librarians stand as the cornerstone of a community if they do not receive care and opportunities for growth themselves? How can you pour from an empty cup? These are the questions that I’ve been turning over when thinking about infinite learning. The idea of infinite learning, of course, is two fold. 1. The library is everywhere (Stephens, n.d.), and 2. therefore, endless learning and opportunities for such must exist and be ever-present and all around us. Library programming is a part of infinite learning, and so is everything else that is tangentially related: Ted Talks, Lego Clubs,…
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Once Upon a Time : The Power of Stories
We all have one book that we claimed as ours as a kid, right? The book that defined our reading habits and built us into the lover of stories that we are with the ideas that define us. Don’t we? I have a friend who claimed Danny, Champion of the World. Another lived and died by Redwall. Mine was The Phantom Tollbooth. I must have read that dozens of times, following Milo into Lands Beyond, jumping to Conclusions, mining for numbers*. The lasting effect was two fold. One: I am 1000% a sucker for a novel with a map, especially if they are lands beyond. The second is that I…
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Taking it to the Streets: New Models
Wendy MacNaughton, artist and illustrative journalist, says that “drawing is looking, and looking is loving.” This is what first came to mind when taking a look at Anythink Library’s Get to Know Your Neighbor program, where a bench and ice-breaker type questions were provided, with the aim of getting to know the neighbors and community members better. MacNaughton’s program functions in a similar way, though instead of asking questions, strangers are invited to sit down and draw each other without looking at their paper. She even took this program to the National Gallery of Art. The point, of course, of both of these exercises is learning to see–really see each…
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Innovation Roadmap: The Armchair Traveller’s Book Club
The Armchair Traveller’s Book Club
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I Can Do Anything! : Hyperlinked Communities
I am here because of Lavar Burton. I mean, no, not really. But yes, really, kind of? A lot of us of a certain age are here because of Lavar Burton, and his seminal show, Reading Rainbow. I mean, I was a child of the 80s! Lavar Burton and his friends made reading COOL. There were kids that looked like ME. I did not grow up in a community with many Hapa kids, I was generally the only one. It never felt problematic when I was really young, but no place is perfect and, like so many of us, I definitely was on the receiving end of multiple unkindnesses. Reading…
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Mind the Gap: Academic Libraries and Food Insecurity (Hyperlinked Environments)
While reading the suggested article about Carroll University’s food share program, I was struck by the idea of turning an academic library into a place where students could turn to reduce hunger in their communities. Harkening back to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, food accessibility in libraries lay the foundation for the success of the whole person and addresses one of the most fundamental needs of personhood. Food insecurity is a severe national problem, and college students make up a large segment of those who are being left behind. Between the high cost of tuition, supplies, books, housing, and food, as well as the added mental load of stepping out on…
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Assignment X: Let There be Light
Library, noun. 1. A place set apart to contain books for reading, study, or reference. (Not applied, e.g. to the shop or warehouse of a bookseller.) In various applications more or less specific. 1.a. c.1374– Applied to a room in a house, etc.; also, †a bookcase. In modern use, the designation of one of the set of rooms ordinarily belonging to an English house above a certain level of size and pretension. 1.b. c.1449–A building, room, or set of rooms, containing a collection of books for the use of the public or of some particular portion of it, or of the members of some society or the like; a…