Where: Anne Arundel Public Library, West County
Charter Update
We crafted a statement of purpose for the MD Statewide SDC group:
The Maryland Statewide Staff Development Coordinators team exists to provide a framework for effective and efficient collaboration of statewide staff development projects and programs, and to share staff development experiences and resources.
We are staff development coordinators from Maryland's public and regional libraries.
We serve the staff and patrons of Maryland's public libraries under the auspice of the Division of Library Development and Services.
We also shortened the operations document that accompanies the charter. Once the final document as been reviewed and approved by Nini Beegan, I'll share it here.
Work Group Updates
Online Exchanges: Jennifer Hopwood (SMRLA) has taken this initiative and turned it into her Conversation Sparks project which is to offer one one-hour event every month on a variety of topics. These events are open to all library staff across the state and country and they will essentially be 40 minutes of presentation made by a guest and then 20 minutes of all-participant dialog/sharing/conversation. There is one event currently scheduled:
August 27th: Tech Savvy Kids at the Library
Conference Sharing: This group is tasked with providing an outlet for staff across the state to share what they've learned at conferences that they've attended and ideas for how they might use what they've learned within their library systems. This group has offered 3 online conference sharing events to date and we have 2 more on the calendar. We hope to offer 4 events per year and we'd also love to see others (library systems, MLA divisions, etc) adopt this conference sharing model themselves and offer them statewide - hint, hint.
New Projects
Staff Development Presenters/Trainers Master List: Sam Eddington (ESRL), Jennifer Hopwood (SMRLA), Lisa Kenyon (EPFL), and I (WMRL) will create a pilot master list of the staff development presenters and trainers we've had over the past year or two that includes the presenters' names, contact info, websites, topics, whether or not we'd hire them again, etc. Sam will create the document and share it via Google Drive and then the four of us will populate it. We'll share it with the other SDCs and if it looks like this is something others would want to add to then, we'll share it with the SDCs who are interested in contributing. Maybe we could possibly add it to the MERLIN site and/or staff development wiki?
Children with Autism: Margaret Carty, Executive Director for the Maryland Library Association, has some strong contacts with autism professionals who she is going to work with to put together a workshop or two on the topics surrounding how librarians can best serve autistic children - and potentially austic humans in general (all age groups)? More info to come on that later...
Creating a Culture of Learning Unconference: So, the SDCs were hoping to walk out of the meeting yesterday with one project that all of us could work on that would benefit the whole state of Maryland. We started to run out of time so, the only suggestion that was made was for us to host one or two unconferences on the topic of "Creating a Culture of Learning." And that was about it. We talked about maybe having 2 separate unconferences - one for supervisors/managers/directors and one for non-supervisory staff. One of the main concerns that bubbled up from this idea is the observation that staff who do not need to earn CEUs are less likely to have learning in the forefront of their minds as they go about their jobs. They're less likely to ask for training or even want to attend training and we would like to see this be different - we would love to see all staff in our libraries have learning at the forefront and be enthusiastic about attending training, even feeling empowered to look for training and requesting it on their own. So, we don't have a date or any other details beyond that so, the group will keep thinking about how we can approach this and go from there. if you're reading this and you have thoughts, ideas to share please do so in the comments section or email me directly.
1 comment:
I am really interested in Conference Sharing. Great idea. How will I find out the who, what, where and when?
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