I work with some fun and interesting people. John Chrastka is one of them, and not just because he’s willing to ham it up in service of ALA. John stars in the latest AL Focus video, a guide to Annual Conference for new attendees. Be sure to watch until the very end.

Your ALA Annual Conference & You

Just a quick note that I’ll be giving a presentation in Second Life tomorrow (Friday, April 18) at 11:00 a.m. CDT on ALA Island to celebrate gaming @ your library day. It’s free, it’s in-world, it’ll be a fun time. Then afterwards, I get to play games at work, as ALA staff celebrate gaming by taking a break to play board, video, and social games.

To celebrate gaming in libraries, you can also listen to the first episode of the new Games in Libraries Podcast. It’s a monthly podcast where experts in different aspects of gaming and libraries present segments about different programs, gaming products, and other news from the gaming industry relevant to libraries. I hope to contribute to future episodes, but Scott Nicholson is the driving force behind it, and with names like Eli Neiburger, Beth Gallaway, Chris Harris, and Kelly Czarnecki involved, you know it’s going to be good.

Addendum: The slides from my talk are now available on my presentations wiki. This was fun - thank you to everyone that came!

Today’s National Library Week video is all about a game, in this case Go Fish. (More NLW videos here.)

With National Library Week right around the corner, AL Focus will be releasing a series of videos to help promote it this year. American Libraries’ editor Dan Kraus based them on some of the statistics from ALA’s Quotable Facts about America’s Libraries brochure. Watch for the rest of them to appear on Focus during the next few weeks.

National Library Week: Reference Desk

You’re welcome to use the intro to create your own promotional videos for NLW. To grab it, follow these instructions:

• Go to alfocus.blip.tv and click on the Episode Archive.
• Find the video you want and click on it, in this case the NLW Introduction.
• Scroll down a little and click on the “Files and Links” area on the right-hand side to get a link to save it to your computer. For this one, it’s http://blip.tv/file/761553?filename=Alfocus-NationalLibraryWeekIntroduction834.mov.
• If you do end up using it, please leave a comment on the video on AL Focus so that we can highlight your work. We may end up doing something with the best ones.

Dancing with the ALA Stars

I’ve learned a lot of things about ALA (my employer) during my first year working there. Sometimes it’s interesting and helps me understand why something is the way it is. Other times my jaw drops because of an interesting statistic (good and bad). I don’t think you could build an organization that works the way ALA does if you spent your life trying. I also hear about good, valuable services we’re providing that are difficult to publicize widely. In fact, there’s a lot going on at ALA that I think would be of interest that doesn’t fit into an “official” channel.

I’ve wanted to write about these things, but I didn’t want my personal blog to turn into “all ALA, all the time.” Now, though, I have a place where I can do this, as I am a co-author of the new ALA Marginalia blog. It’s a place where a few of us can help explain the behemoth that is ALA and comments are open so that anyone can ask questions or give us feedback.

I’ve been asking a lot of questions internally during my first year (my co-workers would probably say annoyingly so), some of the same questions I hear members and non-members asking. This is going to be a forum where we can discuss these things, so I encourage you to join us there.

RSS feed is here (comments feed over here), and I think later today I’ll add an r-mail box so readers can get updates emailed to them. I think we’ve got all of the kinks worked out, but please us know if you run into any problems with the blog.