MARY BUSHING ASSIGNMENT

One website that I use in my personal life as well as professionally is Pinterest. I know almost all of you have probably heard of Pintrest. Pinterest does require a membership however it is free. You can get tons of story time ideas, craft ideas, book suggestions etc. It always surprises me at the different information and ideas that one can get on Pinterest.  With Pinterest you can create different boards. I have separate boards for pre-school story time crafts, Summer Reading ideas, etc. I like that I can pin an idea on the board and then make a note on it, such as " Story time for St.Patricks Day 2012" I can look back at my boards when I am looking for story time ideas next year and see what I have done previously.  I know that someone probably already posted http://www.pintrest.com/ but it is really a fun website that I would encourage all librarians to have a free membership to...its networking on steroids :)

WRAP UP

One of my biggest discoveries through this electronic challenge ( this may sound silly ) was that I should not be afraid of all the databases. I had this idea in my head that some of the databases were scary and complicated. We are usually just so strapped for time that I never made myself sit down and play around with them for a longer period of time. But what I discovered was the complete opposite of scary and complicated. The databases are user friendly and have so much information to offer us. This is going to be my third year as a librarian and I am honestly kicking myself for not doing this sooner. I was also leery of creating a blog and blogging on the Internet, its not something I had done in this format before. But by being a participant in the challenge, stepping outside of my comfort zone and forcing myself to take to extra time I found that blogging is not hard, and that the resources we have at our fingertips are not only very informative, and east to use, they are fun to work with as well.

I plan on writing an article for our library news reminding the public about these resources that are available and I have also put a binder together with the South Dakota Libraries' Guide to the databases and placed it by the computers.  And anytime someone is doing a research paper, this will be the first place I tell them to go.