Looking Forward: What’s New in Year Two

We’ve always felt that this project was fluid and would grow and shift. In preparation for year two we’ve done some minor things like updated our the “What is Transliteracy” page to “Transliteracy for Beginners” It includes a revised introduction and links to a few key articles as a starting place. We’ve also updated our Reading List if you want to dive into the in depth articles.

Along with some minor changes we’ll be making two significant changes/additions.

Guest Authors

We’ll be posting articles from guest authors. We’ll still have our set of core contributors but we’ll also publish guest posts related to transliteracy from across libraryland and hopefully from some people outside of libraryland too.

Monthly Read-Along

This suggestion has come up up several times as a way to introduce people to the concept and a way to facilitate discussions. At the beginning of each month we’ll post an article or report, all month long we’ll discussion the ideas and issues in the comments of the post.

Thank you for your support in year one. We hope you find the blog interesting and valuable as we move into year two.

Looking Back: Our First Year in Review

It’s hard to believe but February 22nd marked our one year anniversary here at the Libraries and Transliteracy Project. Its been a long amazing year.  Being in the thick of things sometimes I didn’t realize how much we’d done until I sat down to write this post.

We’ve accomplished a great deal in a short amount of time, I think a little celebration is in order!

• We added the option to subscribe via Kindle (in addition to subscribing via RSS or email) in June
• We won first place in the Salem Press Blog Awards
• We ran a contest to for a  logo and had to make a hard choice between all the awesome entries to come up with the official logo and made some great swag available!
• WE were nominated for not one, but two Edublog Awards.
• We added new four contributors: Brian Hulsey, Lane Wilkinson, Anthony Molaro and Gretchen Caserotti. We said good-bye to Buffy Hamilton, one of our founders.
• We worked with ALA and LITA to form an official Interest Group and had our first official meeting at MidWinter, and will have two panels at Annual!

I had no idea when I started this project with Tom Ipri and Buffy Hamilton that it would take off like it did. I’d like to say thank you to my fellow contributors and to all of our readers and supporters for an amazing first year!

Stay tuned we have some exciting things planned for Year Two!  🙂

Please Welcome Our Newest Contributor – Lane Wilkinson.

Lane has been writing some great posts about transliteracy at his blog Sense and Reference so we are thrilled to welcome him on board.

Lane is a librarian at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga where he focuses on library instruction and reference services. Originally a doctoral candidate in philosophy, he spent five years as an adjunct philosophy instructor at various metro-Detroit universities. Following his interest in the philosophy of information, Lane made the move to full time librarianship in 2009. His research interests include the philosophy of information, information literacy, meta-ethics, and epistemology.

He writes about libraries, information, and philosophy at his blog, http://senseandref.blogspot.com.

It Is An Honor to Be Nominated

Libraries and Transliteracy has been nominated in two categories of the Edublog Awards – Best New Blog and Best Group Blog.  It is an honor to be included among so many amazing blogs and bloggers.  When I look though the lists I see the hard work and dedication of  so many great people, it is worth checking out the lists just for to discover great new blogs to read, and of course you should vote 😉

Some information if you’re not familiar with the awards:

The Edublog Awards is a community based incentive started in 2005 in response to community concerns relating to how schools, districts and educational institutions were blocking access of learner and teacher blog sites for educational purposes.

The purpose of the Edublog awards is promote and demonstrate the educational values of these social media.

The best aspects include that it creates a fabulous resource for educators to use for ideas on how social media is used in different contexts, with a range of different learners.

It introduces us all to new sites that we might not have found if not for the awards process.

Please Welcome Our Newest Contributor – Anthony Molaro.

I’m happy to announce the addition of our newest contributor Anthony Molaro. I discovered Anthony via his blog when he published the conclusion to a paper he work about transliteracy.

Anthony Molaro is the Head of Technical Services and Automation for the Messenger Public Library of North Aurora. Anthony is currently a PhD student at Dominican University’s Graduate School of Library and Information Science where he holds an MLIS.  Anthony is also an adjunct instructor and usually teaches cataloging and classification .   He is also an information activist, and advocates for the removal of barriers between people and information.  Anthony is one of the co-founders of the Chicago Deskset.

Anthony is currently scheduled to deliver the Keynote Address at the 2010 Arizona Library Association Conference.  He also writes and presents on a variety of topics.  His interests include technology and libraries, eBooks and eReaders, organization of information, digital media, the digital divide, information activism and social justice, and transliteracy.

You can also find on him: