April 21, 2016

Friends & Colleagues, registration is now open for the LibraryLinkNJ Spring Membership Meeting on Wednesday, June 1st.

Space is limited, so don’t delay — register today!

Where: New for this year, we’ll all be together at one fabulous location! We’ve booked the beautiful Forsgate Country Club for this event.

Who:

• Everyone! Please come out to network and participate with your colleagues! 
• VOTING REPRESENTATIVES - Your vote is essential. We should have you listed as the Voting Representative for your library. You can double check by going to the Voting Representative List. Contact lyu [at] librarylinknj.org (Mi-Sun Lyu,) if the information there is incorrect.

If you are unable to attend, we encourage you to designate a proxy by filling out the Proxy Designation Online Form.

Why: Meet our new Executive Director, Kathy Schalk-Greene, plus: 
Networking, Voting, and Learning! We have a great program arranged.

For more information about the program, presenter and the location, please go to our Spring Membership Meeting page.

Did you know that you can schedule a one-on-one evaluation and consultation on your library’s social media presences with Program Coordinator & Social Media Manager Sophie Brookover?

She’ll review all of your presences across a variety of channels, and give you tailored advice to help you bring your content and strategies to the next level.

Fill out this quick form to provide a sense of what you’re looking for.

Makerspace Next Steps: New Ideas and Strategies for Community Engagement, a full-day workshop designed for staff from libraries of all types who have already developed makerspace strategies and programming. Registration is open!

Date & Location: Wednesday, June 15, 2016 | 10:00 AM - 3:00 PM at the Monroe Township Public Library (Middlesex County)

Audience: Staff from all library types who are actively involved in directing the initiatives of their library’s makerspace. Libraries are welcome to send up to two participants.

Cost: $25 per participant

Space is strictly limited to 50 participants. We’ll be happy to put you on a waitlist, but register early to secure your spot!

Workshop Description:
Join colleagues facilitating makerspaces in libraries of all types from around the state for a day of collaboration, reflection, and idea development to bring your space and community connections to the next level. We’ll meet at the Monroe Township Public Library to network, develop strategies for community partnerships, reflect, and build a community of practice.

Learning Objectives:
By participating in this workshop, you’ll be able to:

• Implement new strategies, tools, and initiatives learned from other libraries and gain ideas for potential partnerships and connections to your service community.
• Articulate the value of library makerspaces to both your community and management team.
• Reflect with clarity on challenges, successes, and outcomes of your library’s makerspace experiences to date.
• Build a statewide community of practice among fellow library makerspace managers.

Presented by P'unk Ave. 

Webinar Archives: Learn At Your Leisure!

We know attending live webinars isn’t always possible, so we archive them all for your convenience. No login or registration necessary - just click and learn when it’s convenient for you.

Making Makerspaces More Welcoming, presented by Casey McCoy, San Jose Public Library

You can look forward to learning how to:

• Identify needs and assets of underrepresented populations in your communities
• Implement plans and policies to create a welcoming space for girls and people of color to "make"
• Initiate ongoing reflections and dialogue with staff, community leaders and participants

Fresh Lit: Crossovers & Crossunders in Middle Grade & YA, presented by Sarah Bean Thompson, Springfield-Greene County Public Library System

You can look forward to learning how to:

• Develop talking points for current, backlist and forthcoming middle grade and YA titles in a variety of genres to use in readers’ advisory and booktalks
• Identify and share great older titles to use in simple reader's advisory for middle grade readers
• Discuss current trends in middle grade fiction and nonfiction
• Identify and share young adult titles suitable for middle grade

Keep It Social, Stupid! Social Media Strategy Real Talk, presented by Maryann James-Daley, DC Public Library

You can look forward to learning how to:

• Create a strategic document for your library’s social spaces
• Audit tools to increase employee social productivity and monitor user engagement
• Create a framework for keeping up on social posts during absences, emergencies and times of low staffing
• Establish a rubric for branching out into new social spaces – and determining which to ditch

The New Brunswick Music Scene Archive is a new collection at Rutgers University’s Special Collections & University Archives in New Brunswick. The collection aims to preserve and share the unique musical history of the Garden State’s largest college town. We sat down with collection specialists Christine Lutz and Frank Bridges to discuss the project as it exists currently, and their plans for its future.

(Photo credit: Fritch Clark)

LLNJ: If the collection is open to the public now (it sounded from the article like it was still in process of being developed & made available), what has the response been?

Christine Lutz: Developing the archive is a long-term project, and while the collection is still small and not processed, described or arranged in the archival sense, I would be happy to work with anyone who would like to come in to see what we have so far.

We've had a tremendous response from people who have contacted us to let us know they have material they want to donate. When we had our kickoff symposium in October, each speaker brought items to talk about and to donate to the archive. We've also had some walk-in donations, been emailed scans of items like flyers, photos and newspaper clippings, and mailed items including an audio cassette.

(Photo credit: Fritch Clark)

In the coming months, we intend to focus on working with potential donors and collecting more material. It would be nice to see a real growth in the archive leading up to our one-year anniversary in the fall. (And I should add that while we're focused on collecting rock/punk/hardcore right now, we intend to expand the archive so that we're inclusive of the varieties of music that have emanated from New Brunswick over the years.)

LLNJ: What items in the collection are your favorites or most meaningful to you?

Christine: I feel most drawn to the 7" vinyl we've been receiving from various bands. I discovered the format when I was in college in the 90s and sort of fell in love--it was easily collectible, affordable, had great, or at least interesting, cover art, and sometimes you'd find an item tucked inside the sleeve, like a tiny zine or catalog, or discover colored vinyl. Seeing these items in the music scene archive now takes me back to hours spent flipping through bins at record stores, buying a 7" from a favorite band at a show or being given a friend's band's 7" hot off the presses.

Vintage vinyl: Attack of the Jersey Teens

Frank: The things you don't expect or items that have come wrapped in mystery. I’ve been sent emails with just a JPEG or two, or maybe a link to something, and it has been fun playing detective and figure out the material's context to the scene.

LLNJ: What kind of research do you hope will emerge from students & scholars delving into this collection?

Christine: It's my hope that we can collect more material on women and other underrepresented groups who have been involved in the scene, so I would love to see some research on these groups not only in New Brunswick but also in similar scenes around the country. Long term, we would like to conduct and add oral histories to the archive, and the items in the archive and their donors could be a jumping-off point for that work. I would also be interested in exploring the possibility of creating a digital humanities project that would map the New Brunswick music scene, present and past, and not just sites such as venues, record stores and houses associated with the rock/punk/hardcore scenes, but with jazz, Latino music, etc.

Photo credit: Nick Romanenko / Rutgers University
Frank Bridges and Christie Lutz with some of the first items in the New Brunswick Music Scene Archive.

LLNJ: What's your favorite popular culture special collection aside from this one?)

Christine: I'm always drawn to ephemera collections, and at Rutgers I'm currently having fun exploring our recently-processed New Jersey Menu Collection, (New Brunswick-centric menus from the collection on our blog). We have a range of menus dating from 1873 to the present from around the state, and they include a variety of menus from a handwritten lunch menu from the Court Tavern to beautifully printed late 19th century menus from Long Branch restaurants during the city's heyday as a seaside resort.

Frank: For me, this is the only collection I see myself working with for the immediate future since it will take me a year or two to finish my dissertation, which is the big work I’m hoping will emerge from the collection. I’ll be looking at the New Brunswick music scene as a pocket of resistance to the decline of vinyl records. As far as favorites go, we really take inspiration from the DC Punk Archive. Along the same lines the Fugazi Live Series is a fantastic, super specifically focused archive. I was at the Rutgers show in 1989 and keep checking to see if anything gets added to this show.