Alaska Bush Library Service

Here are a couple of pictures of my recent travels.

This is Diomede Island.  It looks as if it were carved out of the rocks on the beach.  The group I was with were great.  It is scary to be weathered in with people you don’t know that well.  You never know if the stress of not getting home will turn a normally great person into a grouchy person that wants to take everything out on anyone nearby.  We had none of that.  Everyone stayed cheerful.  It was nice to get home on Friday.

A hot bath felt just as great as I had been dreaming about.  Water is an issue on Diomede.  There are not the conventional ways to gather water that you see in most towns or even villages.  It is likely that Dimede residents will be without water at somepoint in the Spring.  Conservation is a year round thought.  Showers were discouraged.  I think each of my group managed to live with only one for the week. Living like that for a week changes your perception of how to use water at home.  I have talked to at least one of my traveling companions that said that they thought twice before washing a dish or using water in a normal way this weekend.

This was the weather as we flew from Wales to Diomede.  It was a beautiful day.  When it was time to leave on Wednesday, the waves were coming up on top of the helipad.  We  knew we weren’t leaving that day.  Same thing for Thursday.  Friday the weather looked better from the morning, but it sure was cloudy.  Finally, we got the word, the flight was on.  While I would have preferred to keep the original schedule, it did take until Friday to make sure the library was up and going. Kindergartner through fifth graders came in to check out books twice while I was there.  All in all, it was a very successful week.

I think I have come late to podcasts. I now know that they can be played on any computer, you don’t need an iPod to play them. The goal for this morning is to add information to the Alaska School Library Association Wiki about podcasts that people may find interesting. I have learned a lot from Library Geeks, SirsiDynix Podcast, LibVibe, and the ALA Web 2.0 podcasts. I hope more school librarians will get into listening and learning through these resources.

I have been in Little Diomede for the past seven days.  This was originally planned as a five day trip that the weather man has extended to seven so far…

For the most part my time was spent in the library doing maintenance.  On top of the fact that I wasn’t able to get out here last year, there isn’t anyone in charge of keeping the library in order.  I taught the middle school students how to put books away.  Four students volunteered to come into the library twice a week to put books away.  Pod 1 students learned about the everybody section and how to find books by their favorite authors.  Pod 2 students learned that there is a system that puts all the same subject books in the same place on the shelves.

With the extra days here I cleaned off shelves that had interesting bits of winners and losers on the junk index. Losers included software from the first library cataloging system we had, Library Pro 1.2 and a pencil sharpener with no collector for the pencil shavings.  The winner was a file folder of copies of the government documents that have allowed people from Diomede to travel to Russia and/or blocked travel to Russia.  These letters were a find for me that someone had put a lot of time in to gather them up.  I made sure that the principal knew where the file was.

If we don’t leave today, there may be a problem.  I am drinking my last Diet Pepsi.  While the local store does have soda in plastic bottles, none of it is Diet.

URL: Making Time for Web 2.0

The question I get the most from library friends, “How do I make time for all this new stuff?” David King is currently the Acting IT Director at Kansas City Public Library. He has some good ideas for making time for use to learn the new technologies.

Interesting tidbit – Being out here in rural Alaska, I sometimes forget how many people are using libraries.  I just went to Technorati and did a blog search for “library”.  I was thinking I would get blogs that maybe I hadn’t seen before and could subscribe to.  What I got instead was a listing of blog entries that use the word library.  In the past 60 minutes, over 100 people mentioned library in their blogs.

Tomorrow is D-Day. I leave for Unalakleet. This morning I gave up on mailing my totes to myself and asked my husband for help. Hopefully, I will go home tonight and find that everything is mailed. If that is done, one haircut and I am ready to go.

The class ended today. We have had a great week and my hat is off to Sue Sherif for all the work that she must have done to put this together. Setting up Seth at data resources for us to learn to get onto the Blackboard site. For the most part we are all onto Blackboard and ready to move onto the distance delivery part of this class.

Good luck to all of us as we start the school year that we can make our libraries better learning environments for our students.

I am starting a new blog.  This one will look at a year in the life of a Bush Alaskan librarian.  I supervise 15 libraries that are in the Bering Strait School District.  It is a wonderful job in which every other Monday I pack a bag and travel to a school for a week.  During that week, I provide lessons in information literacy, do library maintenence, and work with the library aides to make sure they have the up to date information.