CONNECT Minutes for June 2013

Location:  Village Library
Date:  June 11, 2013
Time:  2:00pm - 4:00pm

In attendance: Buddy Johnson-DN-CONNECT Committee Chair, Julie Ballou-NW-CONNECT Committee, Jennifer Jones-CH-CONNECT Committee,  Dana Beach-CT, Darrie Breathwit-SO, Alma Brown- WA, Darrie Breathwit-SO, Jeremy Carey-NW, Mackenzie Cobb-NW, Phyllis Davidson-DN, Jerod Gerfen-MC,  Molly Giles-AL, Mary Ann Johnson-ED, Debbie McPherson-BE, Ann Meeks-BI, Ngoc Nguyen-VI, Susan Ryan-MSL, Angel Suhrstedt-ED, Risa White-NW, Meaghan Hunt Wilson-ED, Elisabeth Wright-VI

The meeting was called to order at 2:00pm.

CONNECT began with introductions and a summary of the purpose and goals of the forum.

CONNECT is meant:

To serve as a platform for librarians to voice questions and concerns

To facilitate a learning and sharing environment for professional development, trends in libraries, customer service, legislative issues, and other topics

To foster a sense of camaraderie between and among the librarians at MLS

The topic for this meeting was reference sources and strategies for difficult or unusual questions, entitled Reference Bag of Tricks.

“Most Likely” Candidates from your Reference “High School Yearbook”

Forum members broke into small groups as Jennifer Jones – CH led an activity on unusual reference questions. Jennifer provided four categories – Most Humorous, Most Popular, Most Likely to Change the World and Most Likely to be Incarcerated – then asked each group to submit questions from their experience as candidates for each category. After a lively discussion among the groups Jennifer shared all the candidate questions and asked the submitters to share with the group how they answered the questions and what sources they used. Then the forum voted for the winners. Results can be found on the resources page.

Twitter It

For the next discussion activity, forum members remained in small groups as Jennifer Jones – CH passed out a sheet with nine difficult reference questions on them. Groups were asked to select any number of questions and imagine they received them as a text message or tweet and were instructed to formulate replies of 140 characters or less (the limit allowed by SMS or Twitter). Again lively discussion ensued. After the allotted time Jennifer read the results and participants shared what approaches they would take or what sources they would use to answer them. Results can be found on the resources page.

Panel Discussion on Little-Known Sources in MLS

Following a short break, forum members heard a panel discussion from librarians who oversee or are familiar with special resources in the system. The panel included Jennifer Jones – CH discussing the large number of Spanish language titles available at CH; Buddy Johnson – DN discussed the Oklahoma Collection, the vertical file, topographic maps, and bound periodicals available at DN; Phyllis Davidson – DN discussed the Genealogy Collection at DN; and Meaghan Attalla – RE was unable to attend but sent information to be shared about the Black History Collection at RE. Each panel member described their collection, shared information about accessibility, and also shared examples of how they use the collections and ideas about potential uses system librarians can make of the collections.

Meeting adjourned at 4:10pm.