Category Archives: librarians build communities

“When you stick your neck out, sometimes you get your head chopped off.”

  By Coral Sheldon-Hess | March 25, 2013 - 10:35 pm | , , ,
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There's Jonas and more happy crafting librarians

Or something like that. (It’s a possible mis-quote of my department head. He was trying to make me feel better with this statement, and it was surprisingly effective.) This is the story of Librarians Build Communities (LBC) in Alaska. To jog your memory: LBC is an advocacy program, where librarians do a few hours of volunteering, using library skills outside of libraries, to showcase how valuable our skillsets can be to our communities. I was on last year’s ALA Emerging Leaders group, working on the LBC project, and one of the to-do items on our project was “Host LBC in … Continue reading →

2012 is over, time for 2013!

  By Coral Sheldon-Hess | January 1, 2013 - 9:30 pm | , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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2012 was an incredibly hectic year. I have been especially tired, this winter, even beyond the normal sleepiness that comes from short days—enough so that I took the three workdays between Christmas and New Years off, which I never do. (It’s so quiet! You can get so much work done!) I tried really hard not to think about work, or much of anything else, during the time off, with moderate success. As a result, I feel almost (but not quite) ready to go back to work, now. But you know what? Looking back, I kind of feel justified in my … Continue reading →

Quick News Post

  By Coral Sheldon-Hess | October 10, 2012 - 1:08 pm | , , , , , , , ,
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I have so many real posts queued up—some of them are even started! But I’m on what I hope is the tail end of a super hectic, um, year. I’ll share some quick news, though (bolded for quick scanning), because I want to tell folks about the things that are going on, and I don’t want to seem to have fallen off the face of the earth. Probably my biggest news is that I’m running for ALA Council—the link goes to ALA’s press release with the list of nominated candidates, not to any kind of Facebook page or other campaigning … Continue reading →

Librarians Build Communities talk at PNLA

  By Coral Sheldon-Hess | August 4, 2012 - 12:42 pm | , , ,
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I talked (for what seems like the millionth time, though it’s not) about Librarians Build Communities at the Pacific Northwest Library Association conference, yesterday. This is what I gave as the description of the talk: Librarians have a set of very useful skills, which could benefit our local communities enormously. Librarians Build Communities is a program designed to match librarian volunteers with organizations in their communities, both to build partnerships between libraries and other organizations and to advocate on behalf of libraries and librarianship, by showcasing librarians’ skill sets. It is still in its early stages, with pilot projects in … Continue reading →

ALA Day 1

  By Coral Sheldon-Hess | June 22, 2012 - 5:09 pm | , , , , ,
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(Numbering the day is no promise to write one of these every evening.) I’m on an iPad, so this will run brief (and choppy) for a post in a CoralBlog. It isn’t so bad to type on, but it’s slow. This was the first day of my first conference in a repeat location. (I attended Anaheim 2008, as an enrolled-but-not-yet-matriculated library student.) I am staying at the EL house, which is a bit of a walk, so I actually passed the hotel I stayed in the last time, which was cool. And then the giant tree I remember admiring, in … Continue reading →

See you in Anaheim?

  By Coral Sheldon-Hess | May 31, 2012 - 6:50 pm | , , , ,
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Things have been hectic, since Midwinter. Work’s been busy (because when isn’t it?), some things in the Alaska Library Association have moved forward (which is fantastic, but potentially time-consuming), various life stuff (including more of Dale’s and my first year as homeowners) has continued to happen, and Group G’s Emerging Leaders project has taken up way more of my time and energy than I should admit to, given the other things I’m supposed to be getting done. But that last one, at least, will be over soon. We’re pulling together our report and our presentation(s), and it’s really nice to … Continue reading →

Do you volunteer?

  By Coral Sheldon-Hess | April 30, 2012 - 1:52 pm | , , , ,
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Folks, I’m going to ask you to do a thing you might not get to do very often: write about how great you are. Or, if you prefer, how great an experience you have had, specifically while volunteering. I know, anecdotally, that librarians and library workers volunteer a lot of our time. (I’m not talking about working late at our own libraries, though that’s a thing we do; nor am I talking about what we do as part of professional organizations. I really mean volunteering, out in our communities.) I used to do stage managing (aka “planning, organizing, and herding … Continue reading →

SMART Goals and Alaskan Librarians Build Communities

  By Coral Sheldon-Hess | March 8, 2012 - 4:24 pm | , , , , ,
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You’ve heard that goals need to be “SMART,” right? It’s a fairly common model for making goals, you know, not pointless. And I have, over the past few years, improved at making goals “Specific,” “Measurable,” “Relevant,” and “Time-bound.” The first two, especially, I do well—I think it’s the engineering training that makes those so easy. But, every once in a while, I realize that I have totally skipped the “A,” which stands for “Achievable.” One of my major weaknesses is perfectionism (and it is a weakness, more often than it’s a strength, especially within the intersection of libraries and web … Continue reading →

Bits and pieces

  By Coral Sheldon-Hess | February 20, 2012 - 4:34 pm | , , , , , , , , ,
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Google Plus OK, I don’t know how long this will be available (and I don’t know a better way to capture it forever than to play-and-grab with screen capture—any Elluminate Live wizards out there with a better plan?), but my Google Plus talk is available here. You’ll need to fill in the email address and name boxes, for some reason I don’t understand, but nothing will happen because of it—you can put in gibberish with an @ sign, and it won’t know. :) It isn’t the world’s best Elive session, but neither is it the worst. I wish I’d said … Continue reading →