LibraryLinkNJ E-Update
LibraryLinkNJ, The New Jersey Library Cooperative - librarylinknj.org
Social Media Snapshots is our regular dose of all the best content from our social media channels, delivered right to your inbox. We encourage you to follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, and now Instagram, wheee! But if you don’t, you can rely on Social Media Snapshots to keep you up to date on developments in technology and libraryland -- here in NJ & around the country -- as well as fun things like photos you can share with your staff and patrons.

Want to know more about how you can use social media to connect with your community?
Drop Sophie Brookover a line!

Delightful literary internet gimcracks abound these days. For example, you didn’t even know how badly you needed this complete list of all of the Literary Moments of the Golden Girls, did you? And then, there’s popsonnet, a Tumblr that rewrites pop songs in the form of Shakespearean sonnets. Here we highlight one that fills us with tremendous, fist-pumping Jersey Pride. (See the image on the right)

This year's Youth Services Forum attracted a HUGE crowd! There were nearly 200 youth-serving library staffers in attendance, all there to participate in a great selection of programming to help move our youth services practices forward in excellence & fun. We’ve put together an archive of tweets, links and images from the day in this handy Storify.

Jersey Pride

Please be sure to check out and bookmark these amazing blogs by two New Jersey librarians who presented during the Storytime Shakeup session: Carol Simon Levin’s Program-palooza Linda Meuse’s Meusenotes are not-to-be-missed resources from two of our most accomplished and thoughtful colleagues serving children.

Speaking of accomplished colleagues, the following NJ librarylanders are doing us all proud:

  • Elissa Malespina, who is now the Educational Technology Coordinator at the Parsippany-Troy Hills School District after many years as a classroom teacher and school librarian, has won a prestigious Bammy Award from the Academy of Education Arts and Sciences International.
  • JP Porcaro, Librarian for Acquisitions and Technological Discovery at the New Jersey City University’s Guarini Library is in a four-way race for the Presidency of the American Library Association.
  • Laura Fleming, Librarian at New Milford High School, published a great piece on Edutopia about how she built a virtual learning campus for all of her students, using the library as a springboard.

On a more serious note, Banned Books Week took place in September, and YA author Malinda Lo’s analysis of the Diversity in Banned and Challenged Books is sobering stuff. Briefly, diverse books -- that is, books featuring characters and themes that don’t pertain directly to the upper middle class, straight, caucasian experience -- are disproportionately targeted for challenges. This is must-read material.

Some recent useful reads on social media management include Travis Jonker’s clear-eyed I Tried, I ‘Liked’, I Shared from School Library Journal and our very own comprehensive (and, to our delight, frequently updated!) list of NJ Libraries on Instagram. (See the images below) If your library should be on this list and isn’t, please drop Sophie a line and she will make it so!

Burlington County Library System

Hanckensack Middle School

Hudson County Community College Library

Atlantic County Library System

Libraries around the country celebrated the first Outside the Lines initiative in September. Spearheaded by the team at Colorado’s Anythink Libraries (more on them in a moment), this project is designed to re-acquaint libraries with their service communities in appealing, interactive ways. Naturally, there’s a Storify recapping the week’s events, and you can read more about how colleagues at Rutgers University Libraries and the Bernardsville Public Library participated in our September E-Update.

Our buddies at the University of Iowa’s Special Collections Tumblr found The Earliest New Jersey Imprint (from 1723!) and dedicated some photos of it to us on Instagram. Awww, you guys! You’re the best!

You want even more NJ libraries in the news? You got it!

  • Hudson County Community College opened a brand-new library last month, and lo, it is gorgeous.
  • The Bridgeton Free Public Library held a rally to raise public awareness and support of its services and mission, even as it is threatened by budget cuts.
  • The NJ State Library has launched a program to help NJ citizens earn their high school diplomas through their local libraries. This program, offered at libraries in Camden, Elizabeth, Long Branch, Scotch Plains, Somerset County and Trenton has garnered national coverage!

True facts about library people: we are crazy for productivity tips, tricks & tools. The TED Blog featured a list of 25+ Apps to Make Your Everyday Life Easier, and while we can’t vouch for them all, there are several that are life-changingly good, including crowd-sourced GPS app Waze, Gmail enhancement Boomerang, and the calendar to end all calendars, Sunrise. Let us know which ones work best for you!

We’ve been noticing an uptick in libraries and other organizations publishing direct-to-digital content, from newsletters like this one to full digital magazines. Two recent examples are School Libraries Transform Learning, a digital magazine produced by AASL & American Libraries, and SPARK, a quarterly from Anythink Libraries (told you they’d be back again!) in Colorado. Both are beautiful and very professionally produced. The former is explicitly designed as an advocacy tool for school librarians, while the latter is more of a general interest publication, published by a library. It’s a fascinating development, and one we’ll be tracking.