Mentor Monday--A Little Bit of This, A Little Bit of That

I'm going to share several resources I've come across over the past few months. The first one is a newsletter that is issued every other month, The 4:00 Book Hook. It contains information for people who work with children, or who have a love of children's books. The latest issue has several book reviews, activities, and an interview with award-winning children's poet, Joyce Sidman. It can be accessed here in pdf form.

The next is a website that is especially of interest to librarians, but one which any person attempting to keep up with the latest technology should find fascinating: INFOdocket: Information Industry News + New Web Sites and Tools From Gary Price and Shirl Kennedy. On any given day you might come across information about a new search app, e-paper, cloud computing, copyright in the digital age, new archives, etc. Well worth checking out, if only for the wow factor.

While the World Memory Project may not be a resource just yet, with your help, it will become

the largest free online resource for information about victims and survivors of the Holocaust and Nazi persecution during World War II.

Children's writers--this may be an excellent project for you to work on since it is bound to stimulate ideas for future fiction and nonfiction writing projects. Check out the link above for details.

Another example of the great power for good that comes with the internet is Swap.com. This website not only allows for reuse of items rather than filling landfills, it also helps schools to obtain materials that would be relegated to wish-lists with ever-shrinking library budgets.

Finally here's a video that was shown at a recent library conference. The topic of the workshop was social media and the law (as pertains to public libraries). The speaker, a lawyer, wanted to make the point that social media (Facebook, Twitter, Linked In, YouTube, etc.) is more prevalent in the lives of the world's citizens than one may have imagined. These 4 minutes more than make that point:



Those of you whose only participation is as a reader of blogs, it's time to wake up and smell the coffee.

Feel free to share resources that you have discovered, use the comments below.

--Diane