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Sorry I've been silent of late but we have been in the throes of relocating from Colorado Springs, CO to Clarksville, TN. Mark has taken a new position in the IT Department with Austin Peay State University. We've been in Clarksville now for about a month and we are slowly settling in. In addition to relocating, I'm currently co-writing a new book for teen librarians and teachers with Tara Cannon (previously of the Pikes Peak Library District). We are so very excited about this book as it focuses on a topic very near and dear to our hearts--teen nonfiction.

This past Tuesday evening 80 teens participated in our Library Skate Night at Skate City! Skate City sponsored the teen summer reading program by giving us a private party with free tickets to 4 hours of skating with skate rentals included! Skate City even provided a bus to pick up 17 teens from the Fountain Library, our southern most branch. The Skate City staff were very friendly and accommodating and went out of their way to make sure that library staff and teens had a great time.

So, here's my addition to the Day in the Life of a Librarian meme :)

7:20AM awake and doing all the normal getting ready for work type activities.

9:00AM arrive at work, parking in the overflow parking lot. And lug the huge backpack full of brochures, library card applications and other booth paraphernalia to my desk (My next post will be all about the library skate night at Skate City so stay tuned!).

Yesterday, I gave a presentation at DrupalCamp Colorado entitled "Form Alterations - Getting What You Want in Drupal Without Hacking". I wanted to make sure that everyone has access to the files from the presentation, so here those are:

Session Page:
http://drupalcampcolorado.org/sessions/form-alterations-getting-what-you...

Slides:

File: 

dcc09.zip

This summer PPLD has the wonderful opportunity to participate in the Summer Work Experience Program through the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. This program was developed to give young adults ages 16-24 valuable work experience in high-demand fields. For many of the young adults participating in this program, this is their first job and their first opportunity to gain work experience.

I was having trouble locating a good Firefox search add-on for searching drupal.org. A Google search or two reveals a couple of add-ons created by community members in the past couple of years that do searches of drupal.org via a Google search (using the "site:drupal.org" keyword). I know, however, that the searches on drupal.org recently received an overhaul (using Apache Solr) and now, searching on the actual drupal.org search is actually more efficient than a Google search in many cases. Especially if you know how to make quick use of the right sidebar of the search page which makes use of faceted search.

I knew it couldn't be that difficult to build a search plugin for Firefox, so I began searching the Mozilla site for instructions on that. If you're interested in doing this on your own, you can find out how to build what's called an "OpenSearch plugin" for Firefox at: Creating OpenSearch plugins for Firefox

If you'd like to download the add-on that I built and begin searching Drupal.org from Firefox, click on the screenshot below:

So when the concept of "login items" appeared in Apple's System Preferences a few years back, I used to use those. Recently, especially since I started telecommuting a couple days per week, I discovered that I really needed different login items (applications) to start up depending on which day of the week it was. For instance, on my telecommute days, I need a VPN application to start up first.

The booktalking season is almost over. I have one more session scheduled but otherwise we're done until the fall semester! This spring, PPLD has booktalked to over 2,000 middle school and high school students. Here are my Spring 2009 highlights.

Favorite quotes of the semester:

Booktalker: "Would you rather lose all of your teeth, or all of your hair?" Student: "Mah hair. I'd look goooooood."

There's a rampant philosophy of sorts running around libraries these days concerning teens. Plan programming that's just for fun and once they're in the door they'll pick up some books and be back. The East Teen Center has been open for about a year and a half and I was afraid that the ETC was proving this mantra to be false. For the most part I see teens who come to the teen center to read and to study and then I see teens who come in to play video games. I don't often see the two cross these invisible lines. In fact, I was rather disheartened to see comments from the last ETC survey like, "get the geeks out of here" when asked how we could make the ETC better. I'm also not sure if that comment was calling the readers and studiers "geeks" or vice-versa :)

Spoiler Alert

Please note, this blog is most definitely full of spoilers so if you haven't read these books yet, please do so before continuing with this post.