And now for the good stuff! Schmoozing with Vendors & Colleagues

While there were very few vendors in attendance, a few were outstanding and plugged products that are of definite interest (and use!) to our customers.

•Did you know that The National Library of Medicine’s Medline Plus makes a tremendous amount of material available in languages other than English, including Spanish and Russian? http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/languages/languages.html

Their “Go Local” feature (soon to be available here in WA!) lets you find local resources concerning special topics such as breast cancer or autism. http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/golocal/index.html

And yes, Medline Plus IS one of SCLD’s very own Web Picks! Health & Medicine, Government Sites. Go check it out these features now!

•And speaking of checking it out now (What are you waiting for? Do it!) http://www.parenthelp123.org/ is amazing! It’s one stop shopping for families to find health insurance, food assistance, unemployment benefits, and community resources for all their needs. The website is designed for CUSTOMERS (not professionals) and is exceedingly easy to use. I was especially intrigued by the childcare resources section, as our customers regularly ask us for recommendations. Gina (Sonia too?) attended the session they offered and got more details. Several of us picked up their display racks & brochures, too, so we should have enough for each branch. We promoted this one at SV's open house and it was very popular with customers. This is definitely a site to keep on our radar.

•I spoke with Baker & Taylor in the hopes of finding a source for Russian language youth materials. We could really use some Russian board books and picture books. Unfortunately, B&T’s “business model” doesn’t work in a way that’s allowed them to do much with Russian. They like to buy a publishing house/book jobber in the country and then use them for supply. They’ve only been able to find individual bookstores in Russia (ditto for us) but boy oh boy check out B&T’s new Chinese selection! The rep really, really, really wanted me to get on board with their Chinese standing order, despite my repeated protestations that we didn’t have much of a Chinese readership.

Talking with other librarians between sessions and during meals was interesting. I learned that being a union shop, King County uses their (extremely few) teen volunteers to dust shelves. That’s right, you read that correctly—to dust shelves. They’re not allowed to do anything a paid staff member might do, so no sorting, shelving, cleaning, etc. Every now and then they’re allowed to assist with Friends’ booksales but that’s about it. So much for my hopes of picking brains about what to do with teen volunteers…

I also learned over lunch why I’ve been unable to access my files from home through Outlook, despite the fact that our very own Aaron did my setup. Said my new friend from Sno-Isle with a sad and knowing look on her face: “You’re using Mozilla Firefox at home, aren’t you? Outlook doesn’t play nice with Firefox. Try it in Internet Explorer instead.” What do you know, she was right. She also suggested I ditch Outlook's calendar and go with Google’s instead… Dessert, good conversation and tech support--who new conference meals could be so much fun?