LibraryTechtonics

I’ve been very busy this week with the Our Lady of the Presentation project, so I haven’t had much time to blog it, or anything else, really. I’ll get to that stuff later.

While working on the OLP project, and thinking about how best to service the younger set, I was thinking back on my experience at Watertown Public, teaching kids about blogging and web “design”. The workshops seemed to work best when I was answering student “how do I?” questions, since it gave me a sense of what they already knew, and what they really wanted to learn, so that I could refocus any background information (online personal security, subliminal messages about good layout) as necessary. All the same, there just wasn’t enough time to cover everything, but the kids were interested, and learning, and I wished I could spend more time getting to the meaty stuff with them.

This morning I was thinking it would be cool to go back to Watertown with the kids and do “Tech Drop-In with the Librarian” nights. It’s an idea that can be well applied in any library, really, where not only does the librarian offer maybe a quick tutorial, but afterwards maybe a little Q and A on specific technology issues, like “how do I build tables in HTML?” or “how do I make a style sheet”, and a little tech reference could be offered, telling patrons about sites they can visit for tutorials and ideas, how to find usable images, *books in the collection*, and *librarian-created handouts* that can help as take-away information. This is slightly different from your average “come learn an application/technology” workshop, since it’s more free-form, and it sets aside time a librarian may not have in the everyday reference desk life, where librarians can get into the specific ins and outs of a kind of tech.

There must be libraries out there that already do this. If you know of one, please let me know. I might be able to make an article out of something like this.

Tags: librarianship