Category Archives: Events

Oct 25

2012 ALAO Annual Conference

I’m going to my first professional conference tomorrow and I’m so excited! Two of the librarians from my undergraduate alma mater are presenting, which I think is very cool and I can’t wait to see it, and there are a lot of other great presentations on the schedule. I can’t wait to hear the ideas and innovations of my colleagues (and make mental notes for when it will one day be my turn to present a new idea to my field).

So if you’re going to ALAO tomorrow, awesome! Perhaps I will meet you there, fellow Ohio academic librarian!

Mar 30

Lessons from the Campaign Trail

This week I’ve been engrossed in the Syracuse University iSchool’s Pinterest contest on the ‘Future of Librarianship’. I entered last week on a whim with the promise of a free book for the winner (The Atlas of New Librarianship by Dave Lankes), but the competitor in me kicked in when I found out I was a finalist. Since then I’ve been consumed with the contest and I’ve learned a few things along the way, related in the form of cliche.


It’s not what you know, it’s who you know. 

Once you get to the voting stage of something like this, merit goes out the window and it becomes a popularity contest. Whoever has the most friends wins, and that’s true in the professional world as well. I’ve been job hunting for a while now, and the jobs I get  interviewed for are overwhelmingly the ones for which I have a connection at the library. That being said, I’m horrible at ‘networking’ – I feel like my intentions are transparent and I’m not sure what to saywhen I’m trying to stay in touch – “Hi, it’s Kaylin, I’m still alive! What about you? Cool. Let’s do this again in a few months, okay?” If nothing else, this contest has given me an opportunity to reconnect with old coworkers and friends.

Don’t burn your bridges behind you.

This is an obvious lesson professionally, but I never applied it to friends before. A year ago I decided to ‘weed’ the people on my Facebook page that I’ve lost touch with, thinking that if I haven’t talked to them since high school I had no need to read their status updates. It wasn’t a bad move generally speaking, but you never know when a long-lost friend or even an acquaintance can help you out. This isn’t to say I would keep every person I’ve ever connected with on Facebook just to win a contest, but maybe there are a few who bear revisiting.

Don’t make a mountain out of a molehill.

Last night I was telling Evan about how I was in first place all day Wednesday and had contacted quite a few people to ask for votes, and he cut me off by asking, “all this for a book?” Okay, yes the prize is a book (one I’m looking forward to reading whether or not I win), but the greater prize is reinvigoration and involvement in my field after identifying as a cake decorator more than a librarian for so long. I also met some cool new librarians and added their blogs to my RSS feed.

Stick to your guns.

About midway through the contest, I decided to use my resources in a different way and ask a friend who regularly handles event promotions to give me some advice. “You can’t force people to get excited but you can make them aware,” he said, adding that I should make sure people feel my enthusiasm, hammer home my message, and stick to my guns. That reminder was invaluable, since I often fall into the trap of formality at the expense of passion and personality when I’m presenting myself professionally.

Find out who your friends are.

I had a couple of surprises in the course of the contest as well. One of my undergraduate professors voted for me, then asked if she could post a link to the contest on her Facebook page and share it around the English department – it was above and beyond what I hoped for, and I was glad to have her in my corner. I found the same enthusiasm in a current coworker, and it’s nice to be reminded who has your back.

All in all it was a rewarding but exhausting week and the results will be published on the iSchool’s blog on Monday.

Mar 20

It’s World Storytelling Day!

And the above is the somewhat questionable official logo of World Storytelling Day. I don’t know, maybe it’s just me… I get what they’re going for, but it doesn’t quite seem on the level.

Anyway, I love Mental Floss for the fascinating information I’m constantly finding on their blogs, and today I learned about WSD. It’s an annual celebration of oral tradition with a new theme each year. For 2012 it’s trees, while previous years have included water, light & shadow, dreams, and the moon, among others. The event began in Sweden around 1991, and became a global event about a decade later. (Source)

The art of verbal storytelling is almost entirely separate from the written word, requiring different cadences, word selection, purpose and direction. As storyteller Georgiana Keable says in the video above, it seems to be more about the journey than the transmission of the information itself – you’re not just trying to teach the listener or get from plot point A to plot point B, you’re enriching and entertaining the listener along the way. When reading a suspense novel, the reader must find himself on the edge of his seat or the journey is ruined, and all of this is dependent on how well the book is written and whether suspense is injected into the words on the page. If the same story is told in the oral tradition, the storyteller can vocally impart whatever urgency is necessary and breathe life into the story almost without regard to the wording.

There are storytelling festivals all over the country, not just on March 20th but throughout the year. I must admit my ignorance, having never heard of such a thing until a few months ago when I found out one of my favorite musicians, Steve Poltz, is booked for Oklahoma’s Storytelling Festival in September. It was something I thought was interesting but which I ultimately dismissed as a unique event outside of my region until I took more time to look into it today.  Storytelling festivals seem to have quite a cult following. Some of the big ones are the National Storytelling Festival which features a midnight ghost story event, the Timpanogos Storytelling Festival which hosts Utah’s Biggest Liar Contest, and the St. Louis Storytelling Festival which offers workshops and University of Missouri courses to correspond with the festival.

I love this idea! The festivals sound like a fantastic, eclectic experience. It’s too bad I can’t find anything in my area for today though – I’ll just have to come up with a story of my own.