Putting for Dol­lars: Library Raises More than $10,000 with Golf Fundraiser

“Win­ter winds and swirling snow failed to dampen the enthu­si­asm that greeted the inau­gural minia­ture golf cham­pi­onship held at the South­worth Library on Dart­mouth Street on Sun­day afternoon.

‘We were a bit wor­ried when we saw the snow, but we had a great turnout in spite of the weather,’ said Dolly Sharek, trea­surer of the library foun­da­tion. ‘We had 274 golfers sign up, and we raised just over $10,000.’

As atten­dance reached its peak at around 2 p.m., all of the 100 put­ters bor­rowed for the occa­sion were in use on the 18-hole course that wound its way around the stacks on both floors, and a line had formed at the reg­is­tra­tion table.

Golfers of all ages were chal­lenged by the unique aspect of the library course, which explored all cor­ners of the build­ing with a 10th hole that teed off on the sec­ond floor and fin­ished on the first.

Some of those tak­ing on the newly installed cir­cuit were evi­dently more prac­ticed than others.

The sev­enth hole brought library trustee Paul Pereira to his knees — and it was not to line up a putt. He was try­ing to retrieve his ball from beneath one of the stacks.” [SouthCoastToday.com]

I ran into a frus­trat­ing issue at work last week. To try to help solve it, I cre­ated the ALA Uni­verse in order to help staff track some of what’s going on inter­nally. I had just received an invite to the beta of Netvibes Gin­ger, the new ver­sion that lets you cre­ate a pub­lic page any­one can view, so I decided to test it by cre­at­ing this resource. I sent an email about it to all staff and encour­aged them to sign up for their own accounts if they want to also track their unit’s blogs, wikis, etc. Then they could add the feed for new doc­u­ments added to our inter­nal knowl­edge man­age­ment sys­tem. We’ll see if any­one finds it use­ful, but I’ve already got­ten a few com­ments from staff who think it will be valu­able to them.

I could have used Super­Glu instead, the way I did two years ago for the La Grange Park Pub­lic Library proof-of-concept, but I wanted a scannable view, rather than a river of news. Michael Stephens has posted about Netvibes sev­eral times with other exam­ples that might give you ideas for how you could use the site. Gin­ger should go live for every­one in a cou­ple of weeks.