Monday Morning Eye Opener 6/8/2009

Good Morning! Today in EYE-OPENER:

1) New WILBOR Libraries in Northwest

2) Reminder Scholarship for Small Libraries

3) Funny You Should Ask Feature

4) Meetings / Events This Week

1) New WILBOR Libraries in Northwest: Thanks to these Northwest libraries for joining WILBOR in the spring enrollment: Sioux City, Denison, Onawa, and the Palo Alto County Libraries of Emmetbsurg, Ruthven, Mallard, and Graettinger. The Palo Alto group came together and wrote a grant to pay the entry fees into WILBOR for the first year—now there’s a great county cooperative project! (Sioux County Library Association did the same last spring…) So welcome to the WILBOR Consortium!

2) Reminder Scholarship for Small Libraries: Here’s a deadline fast approaching: The Exec Board of the Iowa Small Libraries Association (ISLA) is offering a $500.00 scholarship for one ISLA member to attend the Association For Rural and Small Libraries Annual Conference in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. The national conference is September 11-13 in the Great Smoky Mountain National Park. Applications will be accepted until June 15, the winner will be notified by July 1.

An essay contest will determine the winner; applicants must be able to verify that they’ll have the full support of their board and can pay for travel and other incidental expenses beyond the scholarship amount. In fact, essays must be accompanied by a letter from the board confirming that very thing. The $500.00 scholarship is slated to cover conference registration and hotel expenses. Essays are not to exceed 1,000 words. Wouldn’t it be great if a Northwest library is the lucky winner?!

Here’s what ARSL is all about: “… “The mission of the Association for Rural and Small Libraries is to provide a network of people and materials to support rural and small library staff, volunteers, and trustees to integrate the library thoroughly with the life and work of the community it serves…” For more information about the Association For Rural & Small Libraries, visit their website.

So there are membership opportunities aplenty here. Again, scholarship applicants must first be members of ISLA; find out about how to do that at their website, along with the scholarship application form. Again, the deadline here is June 15….

3) Funny You Should Ask Feature: If you want to be guaranteed a weekly chuckle, then subscribe to this newsfeed from Gale Publishing called “Funny You Should Ask.” This weekly digest shares goofy reference question asked in all kinds of libraries. Yep, these are real reference questions asked by real people everywhere—here’s a sample:

· “Do you have a copy of Tammy and the Shrew?” (Lehi High School, Utah)

· “I need a list of all the books that weren’t published last year” (Los Angeles PL)

· “Where can I find a fake marriage certificate that doesn’t look like it comes from Barnes & Nobel?” (Campbell County Library, Virginia)

· “Do you have Sleepy Hollow by Harry Potter? It’s brand new” (Gadsen County Library, Florida)

· “I need to know who painted the Sixteenth Chapel” (Rayburn Middle School, Texas)

· “Who was the Pope when Christ was born?” (Los Angeles PL)

Reference staff are encouraged to share their weird-but-true questions with “Funny You Should Ask.” To do that—and to subscribe to this feature—go to Gale Cengage Learning; here’s the direct subscription link: http://www.gale.cengage.com/enewsletters/funny/index.htm

4) Meetings / Events This Week: Library101, originally scheduled for this Thursday June 11, has been cancelled. The next opportunity to attend Library101 will be September 15. This is an orientation for newly hired directors, typically offered four times each year by the Iowa Library Service Areas. Look for more information about the September 15^th show later this summer.