Both Executive Board President Jane Crocker and Sophie were on hand last weekend to celebrate with the staff of the Gloucester County Library as their Maker Studio at the Mullica Hill Branch enjoyed the grand opening it deserved. We’ve posted several videos and a bunch of photos on our Facebook Page and there was a great write-up on the event at NJ.com! (See the photo on the left)

Digital Humanities is starting to trickle down into the broader conversation about libraries and librarianship. Roxanne Shirazi’s piece, Reproducing the Academy: Librarians & the Question of Service in the Digital Humanities, is well worth a read for staff in every kind of library. (via Tumblr)

Missouri State University is offering a free online course on the Little House on the Prairie series by Laura Ingalls Wilder. We feel this may be of some minor interest to a handful of our members. Kidding! Get your seats now! (via Twitter)

Libraries continue to do essential front-line work with and for citizens at risk of homelessness and food insecurity. Want to get involved in hosting Summer Meal Programs? Here’s how. (via Tumblr, See the image on the right)

Half of the US population lives in these 146 counties and 10 are in NJ! Useful info for your library’s advocacy efforts, no? (via Twitter)

Last week, Sophie participated in an NPR Digital Services webinar on Instagram and wrote up some notes on how libraries might consider using this hugely popular tool -- 200 million active users worldwide! -- to document the vitality of both our present and our history. NPR’s write-up of the event, including links to presenter Emily Bogle’s slides and a recording of the webinar, is also available.

The Talking Is Teaching early literacy campaign is a great model for libraries to consider participating in: Hospitals & clinics are distributing adorable shirts, onesies, and blankets, and new billboards and bus shelter posters are going up all around the city to build a more print-literacy-and-vocabulary-rich environment. The tone is just-right: positive, encouraging & fun, and the materials are gorgeous. Rock on, Oakland! (via Twitter)

These Are A Few Of Our Favorite Tools: Storify
Storify is a handy and user-friendly tool that lets you pull in content from all over the web to contextualize and share relevant stories with your colleagues, wider community of practice and audience. At LibraryLinkNJ, we use Storify primarily to save and share tweets from events we organize or attend. You can also use it for news-gathering, creating an interactive annotated bibliography, or as as pre-writing exercise. It’s almost infinitely flexible, and very useful.

Some favorite recent Storify stories include:

• Workforce Investment Act Celebration With Rush Holt at East Brunswick Public Library
• Digital Preservation 2014 Conference
• CurateCamp, a digital culture unconference held in conjunction with Digital Preservation 2014
• A wide-ranging conversation about librarians and tenure, started and archived by Meredith Farkas