Talking about internet security and safety...

  by  Wilson Afonso 
Last night, Dave and I hosted a presentation and forum on internet security and safety for the Parents' Association for our school. I feel like this is the first time I have presented professionally to a group that is not made up for children so I was extremely nervous.

We had a few months to get things ready but when school is in session, it is so difficult finding time to do all the research and it needs to be done outside of the school's normal operating hours. I am not sure how my counterparts do it. Do they ever sleep? How do you find time to exercise? eat? teach?

Anyway, it was a really wonderful forum. We invited one of the deans as well as our school psychiatrist to join us. Since we were in front of parents, we were anticipating being asked questions that would fall beyond our expertise as information professionals. Let me say, if you are ever going to give one of these presentations and host a forum like it, have someone from administration on board. Because those questions that you will worry about - questions about school policies, questions about what parents should do - will come up. Though, we know about the school policies, we really are not in positions to speak on behalf of the administration but a dean and also the school psychiatrist will have insight into those things and will know how to share that knowledge with the parents.

Dave spoke on internet security and of course, was incredible. He's one of the best speakers. He's funny and engaging. I wish I could be funny but most of the time, I'm thinking about what it is I want to say. I took the part about internet safety. The section that parents started asking questions about was on privacy. There was a lot of questions about Facebook and other social networking sites. We tried to calm their fears and I think, they calmed each others' fears. At one point, one of the parents asked if she should let her 7th grader have an account on Facebook. A lot of the other parents started saying, "I won't let me child have an account" and "I'm the system administrator in my home and I won't let that happen." Another parent said "Well, that child is just doing their job" by saying "everyone's on Facebook." We took an impromptu poll about how many 7th graders had Facebook accounts and the majority of parents said that their child did not have accounts. Seeing that, definitely, reassured the parents who were unsure of their decision to not let their child have an account.

It was such an interesting discussion and I also learned a lot about what parents are concerned with and also what our administration's stance is on things. I also have to trust that I know what I am talking about. Before going down to the room where we were presenting, Dave reminded me that we do know more about these things that other people because it is part of what we do.

Hopefully, we have another opportunity to show the community what we as librarians do as well as collaborate more with other people in our school.

California Doesn't Value Librarians...

Reading an OPED piece from the Los Angeles Times - these statistics caught my eye:

"Other states employ an average of one public librarian to 6,250 patrons. As of last year, 3,432 full-time librarians served 37,253,956 Californians. In other words, California librarians were each expected to serve 10,854 patrons. We also employ fewer school librarians than any other state, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Here, there is one school librarian for every 5,965 students; the national average is one librarian to 865 students."

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-powers-librarians-20111026,0,3265383.story

It just kind of mind boggling to see the disparity.

A School Librarian's Creed

from Joyce Valenza. Response to Marc Bernstein's op-ed in Newsday.

What's in a title? professionalism in the information studies & library field

When I started out in the library and information field, there was talk about the de-professionalism of departments within the field, like cataloging departments and at times, reference departments. I was cataloging even though I was not formally trained as a cataloger and that was my title, "Cataloger" not assistant cataloger.

After I graduated from UCLA, I would talk to my friend about titles. Her assistant was titled, "Librarian" not "Assistant Librarian." At the time, I could see her point, she worked hard for her degree and had a masters specifically in "Library and Information Studies." But then I wondered if she was being too sensitive. I am also trained as an archivist and while working in various archives, some of the archivists I met did not have degrees. But they had worked in the field for a long time and their experience made them "archivists."

Where am I heading to with this? Today I received an email from my sister-in-law (whom I love, she's amazing) but under her name was the title, "Librarian." She works at a professional college and she does work in the library. She is in charge of assisting professors with collection development, she is responsible for acquisitions, and basically, she does most of the work in that library. However, she has only worked there for a couple of months. She does not have a degree. Why am I feeling so sensitive about her using the title? Probably because I spent 2 years working on my Masters and also worked for 9 years in the field before I was accepted into graduate school. I am not sure if I am being too sensitive. Does it even matter?

IL 2007 - "Next Generation Research Tools"

Saturday 1:30 - 4:30 - Preconference Workshop - "Next Generation Research Tools"

Here is a link to the Internet Librarian 2007 blog.

Pam Howard & Mira Foster hosted the workshop. They talked about different Web 2.0 tools, such as Flickr, YouTube, Furl, Zotero, del.icio.us, and Clipmarks, and how these tools have been incorporated into the librarians/researchers repetoire.

They focused on how relationship between the librarian and the user. Librarians need to foster and nurture relationships with users using the tools that their communities are using outside the "library" environment. We also need to take the time to utilize new tools that are transforming how individuals conduct research. There are practices that we are teaching, for example, note taking techniques, that are now being transformed by online tools or new software. Also, multimedia projects are being incorporated into school curricula and we need to be aware and knowledgable on how to use these different tools.

What I really liked about this workshop was the fact that they had practical examples on how students can use RSS aggregators, online note-taking & bibliographic applications, flickr or google maps, in real world assignments.

Tools I am interested in are Zotero, Clipmarks, Noodle and Furl (you can archive webpages). I will post a list of cool links later.

Looking at some of these tools, like Zotero, makes me want to go back to school. It's made creating bibliographies and taking notes from online sources and even collaborating with peers so much easier.