Hello from the Old West

Hello!  I am Janelle Jarboe and reside in Dodge City, Kansas.  I work as an Assistant Technology Consultant/Trainer for the Southwest Kansas Library System.    I am excited to see some other trainers in the group!   I have been at the system for a year and prior to that worked in a public library for 4 years as a System Administrator.  Most of the libraries we provide support to are in a rural areas. 

I am really excited about this course.  As a Trainer I train libraries in our area on new technologies.  I have had some personal and work experience with blogs, rss aggregators, and wikis, online photo sharing sites, etc.  However, I am looking forward to learning even more.  I am really excited about learning more about these new technologies and passing down the information to the libraries in our system.  This course comes at a perfect time.  We are actually in the midst of training some of our area libraries on using WordPress through the MyKLOW (My Kansas Libraries on the Web) project.  A lot of our librarians are very wary of letting patrons comment on blogs.  I am hoping after this week I can supply them with even more examples of libraries that have used blogs successfully.  Time is also something that is a very sensitive topic since some of these libraries only have 1-3 people staffing them.  Thankfully the ease of use of some blogging tools have helped with that. 

As a trainer I also teach some classes online using OPAL.  Online training is still somewhat new to me.  I excited about sitting in on the online classes and podcasts we have every week.  I am hoping I can pick up some good hints. 

 As an aside -  I have also become newly addicted to librarything.  I am a chicklit fan... :)   I created an account several months ago, but was reminded of the tool once again with this class. Last week I was up until the wee hours finding the books I am going to read next.  I am hoping I can take some time in the next few weeks to spiff up my site some.