Ballad in Plain E

I’m so excited that I will be going to the SLA annual conference after all! My sweetie gave me an early birthday gift: funds to cover the costs of going to Denver. Luckiest girl ever!

I’ve been spending the last hour or so mapping out potential hotels and must-visit places on Google’s very cool “My Maps”. Have you seen this yet? It was mentioned on Slaw a couple weeks and I’ve been mucking around with it, creating maps for various purposes. You can mark up a map with your own placemarkers, route diagrams, annotations (including photo & video), etc., and then keep it private for yourself or those with whom you share the URL, or publish it for the world to see on Google Maps & Google Earth.

I can see tonnes of potential uses for this. Imagine making a map for your client with placemarkers for the office, hotel, transportation, etc. Or a map for friends visiting from out of town, listing your favourite restaurants, shops, and landmarks. The possibilities are many.

But…you can’t print off a “My Map” with the placemark data intact. Well, you can print some of the data by File>Print but it doesn’t look very good. A screenshot might be ok, too, but not perfect.

I searched Google Groups to see if maybe I was missing something, but it looks like lots of people are having the same problem. Hopefully Google’s pros will get on this soon.

Rob Golbeck is the winner of the 2007 BCLA President’s Award. Rob is the first library technician to be given this honour.

I first met Rob in 2004 when he joined the LTAIG committee to work on the annotated library technician program listings for the LTAIG website. When he became chair of the committee in 2006, he had big shoes to fill: Diane Walker, our past chair, had been an extremely admirable leader. Fortunately, Rob rose to the challenge and has provided excellent leadership and vision ever since.

Rob is a hard worker with plenty of enthusiasm and drive, and a great sense of humour. His dedication to LTAIG is one of the main reasons we have accomplished so much this past year. Not only does he lead our committee, he also maintains the LTAIG website, which receives thousands of hits every year, thanks in great part to his commitment to keeping it up to date and stocked with good content.

I am fortunate to also know Rob through the law library community, where we are both members of the Vancouver Association of Law Libraries. I feel lucky that he and his lovely fiancee (and fellow library technician) Jen are friends of mine outside the library world as well! They are now BC’s official library power-couple!

I join my fellow bloggers in congratulating Rob — way to go!

After months of pleading, I finally convinced my boss to subscribe to CLE Course Materials online. I am beyond excited. Instant access to more than 1600 conference papers…so convenient! The service offers fully searchable PDF versions of all CLE course materials since 2001. I’m such a nerd; this is one of the most exciting things to happen to me all month! Woo hoo!

According to an article in the March 29 edition of the Williams Lake Tribune, a tiny school in Tatla Lake, BC has won the 2007 “BC Schools for Excellence” literacy award. The school was recognized for having the best literacy program in the province.

You can check out the story, which outlines the school’s many literacy initiative, via Canadian Newsstand on Proquest (available on VPL’s electronic resources) and this news release from the government of BC.

Leslie Lamb, a teacher at Tatla Lake Elementary/Junior Secondary, had positive words about the school’s library technician:

“Both Lamb and parent advisory council president Julie McMann also praised the work of library technician Cyndy Abbott.

“She is very skilled and knowledgeable and makes some exquisite choices in books,” Lamb says.

Because of Abbott’s choices she says their library is impressive even though their book budget is small.”

In a perfect world, all schools would have a teacher-librarian in the library. But library technicians and assistants are proving they can do an outstanding job at promoting and developing literacy,too.

Congratulations, Cyndy!