Pt. 2: Statewide Staff Development Coordinators meeting

When: June 5, 2013: 10am-3pm
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. 

Book Expo America: June 19th at 10am: if you're attending BEA and want to share your experience and if you aren't attending but want to hear what BEA was all about, please click on the first link to register!

Masie's Learning 2013: November 21st at 10am: registration will be available later.

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. 

Pt. 1: Statewide Staff Development Coordinators Meeting

When: June 5, 2013; 10am-3pm
Where: Anne Arundel County Public Library, West County

The Maryland Statewide Staff Development Coordinators meeting is held twice a year for the purposes of getting the staff development/training coordinators from all the public and regional libraries across the state in the same room to work on learning projects, hear from statewide agencies with whom we work closely, to share experiences, etc. 

The following are my notes from the Statewide Organizations' reports.

Dennis Nagle from the Division of Library Development and Services reports that they are almost at full staff. They're close to selecting an LSTA Grants Coordinator. DLDS is working diligently on developing a social media presence and the Maryland State Dept. of Education has hired a social media consultant to assist with this endeavor.

Susan Paznekas from the Division of Library Development and Services reported that they've hired a new certification officer - whose name I did not catch but she'll share it out with all the SDCs once he/she gets settled. Also, if you have staff who are getting certified for the first time - or if you have staff who are renewing for the first time (or if you happen to be one of these staff members) through the MSDE website, this PDF shows you how to do this. 

Jay Bansbach from the Maryland State Department of Education reported on Common Core updates and the public library response. I will share his slides and data as soon as I receive it from Nini Beegan. There is a new STEM coordinator - George Newberry. MSDE is in the process of hiring a 2nd STEM Coordinator. There is a big push, under the common core initiative, for schools to really push library database usage - and more importantly, to get students to identify databases as portals to "sources of evidence."

Nini Beegan from the Division of Library Development Services reported that she is waiting to here back from MEEC (I forget what this stands for) regarding SkillSoft pricing. She'll know more by the end of June. It's possible we may have to go to a seat-based license to accommodate the budget. She also reported that there is a new space on the MERLIN website where we can share and access recordings of webinars that we've created in Blackboard Collaborate or other archived online trainings from other sources. Nini assembled a team of three SDCs will will be reviewing and revising the MERLIN website to make it more user friendly in order to increase its usage by the SDCs and statewide staff in general.

Margaret Carty, the Executive Director of the Maryland Library Association shared very encouraging statistics from the annual conference (i.e. close to 700 attendees!) and she announced that several of the conference programs were recorded and are being made available for folks to watch via the MLA website. *NOTE* You must watch the videos in Internet Explorer. *ANOTHER NOTE* Yes, the videos have been approved for CEUs - but always talk with your staff development coordinator first! Right now there are only 3 or 4 videos available but check back frequently as new videos are always being added!

Helen Blumburg from the State Library Resource Center in Baltimore, reports that SLRC is underway with its 5 year renovation plan. The twice-per-month webinars will continue and have been very well attended. The next SLRC conference will be October 16. The SLRC website will also be getting renovated. 

Gail Griffith reports that the next Library Associate Training Institute will be from August 28 - Dec. 13. The new class of LATIs will receive onboarding information later this week/early next week. They've scheduled LATI Learn How To Learn Online classes which will be open to everyone if there is space after the LATI students register. The dates to mark on your calendars are July 23 and July 25 - 10am and 2pm.