RISD’s Top Reads of 2017

As the year comes to an end, the members of RISD action council have been reflecting on our favorite reads of the year and we just couldn’t help but share.  The list below are books we read, but were not necessarily published in 2017.  Hopefully you will find something to add to your TBR pile, I know I did!

Terese DeSimio

Sing, Unburied, Sing : a novel by Jesmyn Ward
News of the World : a novel by Paulette Jiles
A Dog’s Purpose : a novel by W. Bruce Cameron
A Man Called Ove : a novel by Fredrik Backman
Lab Girl by Hope Jahren

Melissa Groveman

Theft by Finding by David Sedaris
Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman
Dark Matter by Blake Crouch
Strange the Dreamer by Laini Taylor
The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers

Kristin McCormick
A Man Called Ove by Fredrick Backman
My Own Words by Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman
Beasts of Extraordinary Circumstance by Ruth Emmie Lang
Beartown by Fredrick Backman

Bill Meltzer

The Female of Species by Mindy McGinnis
Fair and Tender Ladies By Lee Smith
You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me by Sherman Alexie
Merchants of Doubt by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway
Ceremony by Leslie Marmo Silko

Catie Polack

Just Kids by Patti Smith
The Moth Presents All These Wonders edited by Catherine Burns
Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman
Saga by Brian K. Vaughn
Word by Word: the Secret Life of Dictionaries by Kory Stamper

Carla Schober

The Empty Grave by Jonathan Stroud
The Collapsing Empire by John Scalzi
Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann
A Conjuring of Light by V.E. Schwab
Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman

Megan Sheeran

The Power by Naomi Alderman
Gather the Daughters by Jennie Melamed
La Belle Sauvage by Philip Pullman
The Not-Quite States of America by Doug Mack
Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge by Erica Armstrong Dunbar

Don’t let the list stop here.  Let us know your favorites of the year!

-Catie Polack

Product Reviews: Beyond Consumer Reports

The holiday shopping season is upon us and you might be experiencing an increase in product review requests. Someone searching the internet for information on the hottest new toy is more likely to find videos of people unboxing and playing with it than a discussion of quality and lasting power. Consumer Reports is the go-to for product reviews, but it does not cover everything. Crowd-sourced reviews such as those on Amazon can be useful, but the validity of many is questionable. Product bloggers can also give insight, but many only evaluate products provided by manufacturers or retailers. Here are a few other free options for shoppers seeking impartial professional reviews.

Consumer Electronics & Computers
https://www.cnet.com/
Provides product reviews and news for a wide variety of electronic products including household appliances.

http://www.pcmag.com/
Provides reviews, news and top picks for consumer electronics, computer software, and apps.

Cooking Equipment and Product Taste Tests
https://www.americastestkitchen.com
Register to access some content from America’s Test Kitchen, Cooks Illustrated, and Cooks Country. All have the same reviews. Reviews are behind a paywall, but there is a 14-day free trial that allows complete access. A credit card is required but not charged if the account is cancelled within the 2 week time frame.

A Little Bit of Everything
These sites review a wide variety of products and are the most likely ones for finding professional reviews of toys, home and garden, health and beauty, specialty products, plus consumer electronics, appliances, automotive equipment, etc.

Home

Evaluates existing product reviews and makes recommendations based on those that are deemed to be authentic and trustworthy.

http://www.goodhousekeeping.com/product-reviews/
The Good Housekeeping Institute tests home, health, beauty, clothing, food and other everyday products. They are known for giving various “Seals of Approval.” Not all positively reviewed items earn seals. Manufacturers must apply, and their products are put through rigorous testing. Good Housekeeping provides a 2 year limited warranty on items that earn seals.

http://thewirecutter.com/
Owned by the New York Times Company. Makes recommendations for “the best” of a huge variety of products. In 10/2017 NYT merged wirecutter.com, which focused on electronics and gadgets and sweethome.com, which reviewed household, garden, health, and recreational products, into the Wirecutter website.

Ebsco MasterFile Premier

Useful for finding consumer and trade reviews of a wide variety of products. It contains full text to thousands of magazines including, of course, Consumer Reports. Many other magazines review products. Some, like Good Housekeeping, provide reviews of everyday household products. Others, like Bicycling or Sky and Telescope narrowly focus on specific product types. To search for consumer product reviews in EBSCOhost MFP:

• Click on the Advanced Search link just below the search bar
• Type the product into the search box
• Scroll down to the Limit Your Results box
• Check the Full Text box
• Scroll through the Document Type menu and select Product Review
• Most people shopping for products are looking for ones currently on the market. You can narrow your search by date to find only recent reviews.
• Click the full-text-only box, if desired
• Run the search

Know of other high quality resources? Please post in the comments.

Melissa Groveman

RISD Shines at 2017 OLC Convention

The annual OLC Convention and Expo always offers a plethora of stimulating and often fun programs, and RISD usually has a prominent presence.

As Coordinator this year for RISD, I find it very gratifying that once again our Division organized and sponsored (and co-sponsored) many programs for the OLC Convention and Expo. In total, we sponsored four programs and an unprogram, and co-sponsored three more.

As usual, our programs addressed a variety of issues and concerns, including some beyond the confines of reference and information services.

For instance, the program “Employment Opportunities for Restored Citizens” addressed ways to help patrons with criminal histories build job connections and find gainful employment.

Another RISD-sponsored program, “Assisting Victims of Domestic Violence,” spoke to how libraries can serve patrons victimized by domestic violence through both active intervention and the provision of information helpful to such persons. It also addressed de-escalation strategies for irate patrons, including apparent abusers.

RISD also sponsored “Libraries LAUNCH a Better Workforce,” which discussed the Dayton Library’s initiative to use community resources and partnerships to help members of the public develop their careers and find jobs.

RISD was pleased to collaborate with the Children’s Services Division in developing and presenting “It Makes Sense: Kid-Friendly Reference Tools for No Cents at All,” a program that explored numerous free online resources that help with child-oriented reference services.

Children’s Services also partnered with us in sponsoring “Take a Walk on the Wild Side: Programming with Animals at Your Library.” This program discussed several in-library programs featuring animals, from butterflies to incubating eggs and hatching chicks, to visits by a wolf.

In the most hard-hitting and chilling programs I have ever attended, “Intellectual Freedom vs. Authoritarianism,” Alison Macrina of the Library Freedom Project talked about the frightening extent to which our online activities are tracked by corporations and potentially, if not always, our government. She warned that the personal information compiled could be readily exploited by an authoritarian regime. Stressing that our fundamental values are opposed to such invasions of privacy, Macrina urged libraries to do more to protect their patrons from surveillance by using secure browsers (i.e., Tor) and insisting that database vendors—such as EBSCOhost, Gale, and ProQuest—cease collecting information about our patrons who use them. Otherwise, we become complicit in these insults to freedom. The website above offers details on steps we can take to assert our values in today’s world. This program was co-sponsored with the Intellectual Freedom Committee.

Another program RISD developed was “Making Reference Service Great Again: What Does It Mean to be an American Library in a Post-Truth Era?” [Full disclosure: I was one of the presenters for this program.] This presentation outlined the rise of truthiness and the post-truth world, discussed their threats to a democratic society such as ours, and explored the important role that libraries and reference services can and should play in countering those threats. The website Libraries in a Post-Truth Era presents the slides, notes for speakers’ comments, and a reading list, as well as the results from an affiliated unprogram (description follows).

That unprogram, “Libraries in a Post-Truth World,” featured group discussions and suggestions as to the challenges libraries and librarians face, and how to address them in the current situation. The notes from these stimulating discussions are posted on the website above. Although each of the four groups came up with unique suggestions, there was also a notable degree of converging ideas regarding how libraries and reference services can continue to assert the value of facts and knowledge in the face of widespread suspicions of experts and attacks on the very idea of authoritative knowledge.

–Bill Meltzer

Check out a Local Business in Ohio

Patrons often want to know how they can tell if a local business or service is a good business or service. Sometimes they’re only interested in Yelp reviews, but usually they want something a little more definitive. Recommending a good attorney or a good plumber is beyond what we can ethically provide as public library employees, but we can help narrow the field.

While there often aren’t professional reviews for small local businesses (and many personal reviews aren’t very reliable), most local businesses are regulated in some way, which means there’s usually some publicly available documentation if a professional or a business has done something unfortunate. If you’ve tried Angie’s List, the BBB, and your local newspaper without any luck, consider some of these resources:

• Attorney Directory Search – the Supreme Court of Ohio disciplines lawyers who have violated their code of conduct. Search for an attorney to find out if they have a disciplinary history, or if they’ve been sanctioned or suspended.
• License Look-Up and Ohio E-License Center – many professional fields, from doctors to cosmetologists, require licenses to practice in the state. Check to see if they’ve been disciplined by their board. Note that the boards on the Ohio E-License Center are slowly moving to the newer License Look-up website – if you don’t see the board you’re looking for on one site, check the other.
• County Restaurant Inspections – I haven’t linked directly to a resource because there isn’t a current, central source for all the inspection reports in the state. The best way to find your local restaurant inspections is to do a web search with your county name, Ohio, and the phrase “restaurant inspections.” Then (if you dare) you can find out what kinds of violations your favorite local restaurants have had in the past.
• County Court Records – Similarly, your county might have digitized its Municipal or Common Pleas cases, and they might be searchable online. If a business or professional has suffered repeated lawsuits, it might be a sign of our litigious times and the nature of that profession, but it could also be a warning.
• Ohio Attorney General: Search Consumer Complaints – This database allows you to find out if complaints against the company you’re investigating have been received by the Attorney General. You can then request these records, if you’re so inclined. Strangely, after you’ve entered your search terms, hitting the enter key doesn’t run the search – you must use the mouse to click on “Search” to get results.

What other resources do you use to help patrons research local businesses? Let us know in the comments!

Megan Sheeran

Consumer Health Resources

When working the reference desk you are bound to get a medical question that will leave you scratching your head. Whether it is a disease you have never heard of before (and can’t pronounce) or a medical overshare. When moments like these occur it is important to have a number of go-to consumer health resources in your arsenal.  Below are some great free resources that cover everything from Aspergillosis to Zoonoses.

American Cancer Association
The American Cancer Association presents a comprehensive look at different types of cancer, along with the treatment and support options available. If you don’t find what you need here, check out the National Cancer Institute website.

County Health Ratings
This site shows health information on a specific counties.  This can be great for a library to see what health concerns are most prominent in their county.  It also provides a list of Ohio specific “Community Health Improvement Resources”.

Food and Drug Administration
Finds information on recalls, safety alerts, and specific drugs.

Health Finder
Although it is less comprehensive than Medline, its easy to use interface is great for those with a lower literacy level.  Much of the information on the site is also available in Spanish.

HealthReach
Healthreach provides multilingual health resources including audio and video.  It also contains disaster relief information.

Household Products Database
Provides information on over 16,000 consumer brands’ chemical ingredients.  This website can be useful for narrowing down which products contain a specific chemical.  It also will tell you information on effects of chemical ingredients and pulls information from the National Library of Medicine toxicology related-databases.

Lab Tests Online
This website helps patients and caregivers understand the often confusing lab tests and lab test results.

Long Term Care Consumer Guide
Offers access to a searchable directory of different long term care facilities in Ohio.  Information on the quality, cost, special care factors, and a number of other facility specifics is provided.

Medline Plus 
This resource is already familiar to many librarians and for good reason.    If you are only going to remember one resource, this is the one!  Features include:

• An “Easy to Read” information section
• A medical dictionary that covers word parts, what they mean, and common abbreviations
• A plethora of multilingual resources, including audio and video
• Video and animations with audio, including surgical videos

National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health
Has information on non-mainstream medical approaches such as herbs, homeopathy, and massage.

National Network of Libraries of Medicine Resources for Public Libraries
From the National Network of Libraries of Medicine this resource is specifically for public libraries and includes information on consumer health funding opportunities training, and resources.

The Ohio State University Library for Health Information
The Ohio State University Library for Health Information is a PUBLIC consumer health library so they will answer questions for anyone, not just their patients.  They will also compile packets of information for people and send them out via mail for no cost.  Since they have access to more medical specific databases than the average library, this is a good resource to refer patrons to that might need more in depth help.

This is not a comprehensive list so let us know of some of your favorite consumer health resources!

Catie Polack

Easy Email for Your Patrons

Whether applying for a job or signing up for Facebook, people find most online tasks require an email address. But if you have helped a patron in your library recently, chances are you have noticed the old standbys–Google, Yahoo, and AOL–require a cell- phone number, alternate email address, security questions, and maybe your firstborn child to sign up for a new account. And heavens forbid that you ever forget your password!

This process can be especially hard for technologically-challenged patrons who are already stressed by being online. Sometimes such patrons are adamant about having @yahoo.com, @gmail.com, or @aol.com. But most of the time they just want a quick address that will let them finish the task they started hours ago.

For these people, directing them to one of these easy to access online email programs may be the way to go.

Here are several, listed in order of ease of use, these programs allow an account to be set up in under 2 minutes and make the process of retrieving a password a breeze.

Safe-Mail.com
http://www.safe-mail.net/

Safemail is the ultimate in easy to use online email pages. You do not even need to provide your name if you do not want to!

While there are no bells and whistles with this program, you can send and receive emails, access a calendar, create an address book, and chat.

 

Mail.com
https://www.mail.com/mail/#.1258-header-nav1-1

Mail.com does require a security question but otherwise has a very easy set-up. The homepage is very similar to Yahoo or AOL so if the customer wants to browse news and weather in one spot while logged in, this is a great option for him/her. The actual email client is also a little fancier in appearance than Safe-Mail, but that will not be a problem for most users.

 

GMX
https://www.gmx.com/mail/#.1559516-header-nav1-2

Again, nothing particularly special here, but it is free and easy!

[posted by Bill Meltzer on behalf of Laurin Arnold]

Consumer Finance Protection Bureau: A treasure trove for financial reference questions

As librarians, we sometimes get asked questions that can elicit some anxiety; and for me, those questions are typically financial ones. But I’ve finally found a great resource for personal finance queries. The Consumer Finance Protection Bureau’s website is a wealth of information for both professional growth and as a referral source for patrons.

CFPB was born from the ashes of the 2008 recession, with a mission to protect consumers from financial problems and holding organizations accountable for their financial practices. They take consumer complaints, investigate unethical and fraudulent practices, and provide personal finance resources designed to empower individuals.

The most exciting thing about their website, however, is that they also have information designed specifically for librarians to use. There are webinars, program ideas, an entire catalog of helpful websites, and free worksheets and other publications that libraries can order in bulk through the Government Printing Office.

And for the data-addicted among us, CFPB provides access to datasets of consumer complaints (with consent), company responses, and tools to sort and analyze the data. It’s a fine example of government transparency, and a fun way to kill an afternoon for any librarian interested in spreadsheets.

A word of note: the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau is part of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, which is currently a target of a bill in the U.S. House of Representatives that, if passed, could significantly limit the resources and power of the organization. So, resources available through consumerfinance.gov could change in the near future. But at least for now, CFPB is ready and willing to help consumers and librarians with a wide variety of financial reference questions.

Combating Misinformation Online

There’s been a great deal of discussion recently about misleading information being published as fact online. There has always been misinformation online, including strange hoaxes like the jackalope, and more alarmingly, a long-running and infamous (to librarians) website from white supremacists dedicated to spreading lies about Martin Luther King, Jr. – I won’t include the link here. There’s growing concern that library patrons of all ages aren’t able to distinguish reliable news and current event resources from those that aren’t reliable.

Unfortunately, lie detector tests aren’t that reliable either.

So how can we help our patrons evaluate information and find reliable sources in an age when inflammatory lies seem to spread far more quickly than the less-attention-grabbing truth? We have many evaluation tools that can help, including some newer ones for web resources, but I think it’s important to understand why someone might publish misinformation, and what we can do to discourage that practice. I think it’s also useful to consider some of the many drawbacks to Google, and why the common online refrain of “just Google it” might not actually help most patrons.

Most websites that publish any information do so with a profit motive – they can make money from advertisers if their site is viewed by a lot of people. Many excellent and reliable websites operate in this economy, and some will occasionally post articles with clickbait titles (along the lines of “you won’t believe what happened next!”). Many moderately reliable to less reliable resources have made a living off of clickbait. Completely unreliable resources also exist, and may use inflammatory headlines to garner many, many clicks, thus producing a significant profit for someone who is lacking in information ethics. Social media and online message board websites can be incredibly reliable or laughably false, depending entirely on the person who is posting, whose credentials should be independently verified.

One way to starve out the misinformation economy is to install an adblocker in your web browser – then any sketchy websites you might end up on won’t benefit from your presence. You’ll also have some better privacy protection and online security as a bonus. The disadvantage here is that the reliable sources you visit would then also lose out on advertising revenue. You can remedy this by whitelisting them in your adblocker, by accessing the resource through your library’s subscription database, if they have one for that website, or by becoming a paid subscriber. Reliable websites who publish could also help solve this problem by selling ads directly, rather than through an intermediary. If websites posted ads directly, adblockers wouldn’t have any impact on their revenue, and this might even provide a benefit for those who currently advertise online and are understandably concerned about ad fraud.

As far as research advice, Google is a common go-to source for someone who is trying to learn more about a topic. danah boyd’s book, It’s Complicated: the Social Lives of Networked Teens, includes a discussion on teen perceptions of Wikipedia and Google’s reliability, perceptions that were shaped by their instructors. Alarmingly, Google was considered to be an incredibly reliable source, while Wikipedia was considered an unreliable resource, even though they actually have a lot in common. Many of the websites in Google’s top results are websites that provide user-generated content. Just as (in theory) anyone can edit Wikipedia entries, anyone can create a website, and some have successfully manipulated Google to end up at the top of Google’s results list. Unlike Wikipedia, if a website wanted to appear at the top of Google’s list, they could actually just pay to appear there, as the top few results are usually paid ads, many dubious in nature (still), and many, many patrons do not know that. Add in complications like personalized search results, the unreliable resources that often populate Google Answers, and the preference for popularity, and it’s not surprising that Google often has struggled with top links and automatic search suggestions for some truly awful misinformation. Web searching is a messy business, and while Google can be a useful tool, results should be taken with a pound of salt, instead of just the usual grain. Like Wikipedia, follow up is required.

So what can we do to evaluate a web source, and what should we train our patrons to do? Here are some considerations:

1. Who is responsible for the site or post? Why are they qualified on this particular issue?

• Check their credentials on a different website
• Even if this person has five doctorate degrees, are any of them relevant to this issue?
• Are they reblogging or retweeting something? They might not have vetted it first, so you should
• On a website, look for an “about us” or “contact us” section
• If there isn’t one, look the website up. Websites are registered, so there’s usually a name and contact information for a person or organization that you can then investigate. It’s possible to mask your registration for privacy reasons, but if a major website does that, that could be a red flag, especially if that resource is claiming to be a major news site, or from a major organization or business. If it’s a personal website, privacy protection is pretty common, and is not usually a red flag
• If they have a contact email, how believable is it? Organizations will usually have emails that end in @fda.gov, or @nytimes.com, or something that refers to their organization. A Gmail, Yahoo, or AOL email address that claims to represent a major organization or company could be a red flag

2. What’s in a web address? A rose by any other name definitely wouldn’t smell as sweet.

• There are many, many phishing websites that will load a webpage that looks identical to the real site. Check the web address, and watch out for websites that end in .com.co
• Your browser should put the true domain in bold letters, so if you see something in the address bar like: homepage.google.mail.com, you are not on Google, and you shouldn’t enter your account information
• .edu/.gov/.org/.com. This can help you decide on how reliable a source is – .org and .com don’t have the same usage restrictions that .gov and .edu do, so they can have variable mileage on reliability
• Is it a personal website on a professional domain? This can happen in .edu web sites – professors and students can sometimes get personal webspace from their university. Look for ~smith (or something like that, that looks like a last name) in the web address. Sometimes professors have webspace from their universities for professional reasons, like making materials available for students – you can usually tell fairly quickly if this is the case, as there will be a syllabus, and classroom materials

3. Is a picture worth a thousand words? It’s complicated.

• Try a Reverse Image Search with Google, and see if an inflamatory image is truly from the time or place the author suggested
• In social media, links to articles will usually post in a way that highlights the image and the headline, but that obscures relevant information for evaluation, like the web address or the date. If you hover the mouse over a link, you can usually at least check out the web address in the lower left hand corner of your browser before clicking, and evaluate the source

What tools and tricks do you use to evaluate web resources? Please share in the comments!

Megan Sheeran

RISD Top Reads of 2016

With all the best books of 2016 lists being posted, we wanted to share our favorites.  Below are the RISD action council’s favorite books we read (but were not necessarily published) in 2016.

Laurin Arnold

1.) Dresden Files series by Jim Butcher
2.) Princess and Pony by Kate Beaton
3.) Magnus Chase series by Rick Riordan
4.) The Sandman graphic novel series by Neil Gaiman
5.) The Unwritten graphic novel series by Mike Carey and Peter Gross

Melissa Groveman

1.) Eligible by Curtis Sittenfeld
2.) Montmaray Journals trilogy by Michelle Cooper
3.) Seveneves by Neal Stephenson

Kristin McCormick

1.) Furiously Happy by Jenny Lawson
2.) Challenger Deep by Neal Shusterman
3.) Modern Romance by Aziz Ansari
4.) Harder by Robin York
5.) The Girl With the Lower Back Tattoo by Amy Schumer

Bill Meltzer

1.) Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi
2.) Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. LeGuin
3.) How to be Miserable: 40 Strategies You Already Use by Randy Paterson
4.) Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell

Catie Polack

1.) Lab Girl by Hope Jahren
2.) Relish: My Life in the Kitchen by Lucy Knisley
3.) Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan
4.) The Lottery and other Stories by Shirley Jackson
5.) The Handmaiden’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

Megan Sheeran

1.) Female of the Species by Mindy McGinnis
2.) The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu
3.) Trainwreck by Sady Doyle
4.) The Starlit Wood edited by Dominik Parisien and Navah Wolfe
5.) Dinner Pies: From Shepherd’s Pies and Pot Pies to Tarts, Turnovers, Quiches, Hand Pies and More by Ken Haedrich

Let us know what you think of our selections and if you have any favorites we left off our lists.  Happy reading!

Catie Polack

Be Unconventional at the Convention!

The 2017 OLC Convention and Expo, to be held next October in Dayton, gives you the opportunity to stretch yourself and give voice to the issues and perspectives you care about most.

This year’s convention theme is Libraries in Balance, a phrase that evokes both tensions—print vs. digital, quiet space vs. collaborative space, more stacks vs. more merchandising shelves, etc.—and balance or equilibrium as such.

If there is something that really gets you going about libraries, consider developing your thoughts into a LIBChat or an Unprogram, two rather unconventional formats for programs at the convention.

A LIBChat (or as I like to call it, a LIBRant) is a quick talk of no more than ten minutes.  No slides, no other aids, just you, your voice, and your passion.  It can be about something related to the convention theme, or simply related to something concerning libraries about which you care and want to hold forth.  Being provocative—not to say outrageous—is encouraged.

If it is related to libraries and you want to talk about it passionately, go for it!

Past LIBChats sponsored by RISD include the topics of popularity-based collections, on whether an MILS is necessary, if Dewey should be replaced, and on cultivating a culture of curiosity.  Others have been on overdue fines, homelessness, teen services, and hungry children.

Personally, I have found giving LIBChats to be remarkably rewarding.  They challenged me to organize and develop lines of thought about library issues I care about deeply, and then share those thoughts with a thoughtful audience.  Afterwards I met many people who had comments or responses to my words, and that was also gratifying.  So if you have insights or ideas or viewpoints that you wish to share if only you had the chance, this is a fine venue.

Unprograms are another possibility.  The unconventionality here is that there is little or no agenda or planned presentation:  a moderator or facilitator (or two or three) outlines a theme or question or problem, then manages a discussion that includes everyone who attends.  The sharing of thoughts, perspectives, and experiences generates a rich mélange of thought-provoking ideas.  If you are curious about what your peers have to contribute on some topic—say, the future of reference, how to negotiate a salary, or women’s careers in libraries—proposing an Unprogram is a great way to go.  Previous Unprograms have included those topics as well as early literacy, marketing to teens, and “guerilla storytime.”

Of course, proposing a LIBChat or Unprogram, like any other program proposal, is no guarantee that it will be accepted for the Conference.  But if you have what you think is a good idea, write it up and submit it by the deadline of February 13.  And if you think it would be of interest to RISD, please contact us and we will almost certainly sponsor it.

Bill Meltzer