By Shannon Roy
Kansas Kilroy has gone on a much-needed vacation, but will reclaim WebJunction Watch in the October issue.
I once joked that WebJunction had become so big that the finest WebJunction Coordinator in the country could get lost in it. In spite of heroic efforts at organization, WJ sprawls in every direction. When you consider that it isn’t nearly as deep as it could be if more experts had time to post their expertise, you do wonder what the future holds.
But it is a wonderfully useful tool. The WebJunction courses that the State Library has worked to make available at no charge have been flying off the online “shelves.” The courses don’t disappear, but the consumption of course credits is impressive.
Smart public librarians have taken the time to get a good idea of what is available in “Library Management” and “Library Services.” A lot of librarians are no doubt making excellent use of “Technology,” but I am not an administrator. When confronted with a new technology or a technical problem, my instinct is to clutch the nearest knowledgeable being and not let go until I get answers.
Though it sounds a bit alarming, and can be if I get scared, that IS a very modern approach. In the last few years, nothing has impressed me more than the way librarians have turned each other into a resource incredibly wide and incredibly deep. The answers that are generated in less than a day, often in less than an hour, to questions that would once have gone unanswered, is really staggering. WebJunction has understood the importance of this trend from the beginning and they have provided online homes for dozens of topical and geographical discussion boards.
The amount of Kansas material on WebJunction Kansas is growing. Many topical areas are a mixure of state and national material. You can often find the state material in the second documents tab, if there are two.
The newest tab on WebJunction Kansas is the Continuing Education Tab. The Certification Program is there and an FAQ for the program and the Core Competencies and a variety of Kansas-based courses and resources.
But the Continuing Education tab is also the stage for a new development in WebJunction Kansas. With the development of the Learning 2 Action Training Packages, Kansas librarians will be posting a variety of creative projects to WebJunction Kansas Continuing Education. The first set is on the Marketing and Merchandising of collections, which was a rewarding field to explore for all of us. Within a few years, this resource could easily break the confines of the training packages and become a very rich vein of shared creativity in many library fields.
