Are you a genealogist or family historian?  Would you like to find out more about the resources available at the Washington State Library and Washington State Archives for researching your Washington relatives?  Then you’re in luck this weekend!  Librarian Kim Smeenk will be highlighting genealogical resources at the State Library and Archives in a free presentation at the Heritage Quest Research Library on Saturday, October 22 at 10 AM in historic downtown Sumner.  HQRL is a nonprofit genealogy library, managed and staffed entirely by volunteers.  You can find directions to HQRL here.  Hope to see you there!

Volume 6, September 2, 2010 for the WSL Updates mailing list

Topics include:

1) FIRST TUESDAYS PRESENTS the Career Bridge database

2) CONNECTING THE DOTS WEBSITE

3) FIND AN EARLY LEARNING FAIR IN YOUR AREA

4) BOOKS FOR BABIES

5) CIRCLE OF LEARNING SCHOLARSHIPS

6) ALA ANNUAL CONFERENCE FUNDING OPPORTUNITY

7) UPCOMING FREE CE OPPORTUNITIES

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Volume 6, June 17, 2010 for the WSL Updates mailing list

Topics include:

1) MORE ELLUMINATION!

2) SUBSCRIBE TO THE LIBRARY CLIPPINGS NEWS SERVICE

3) LSSC PORTFOLIO MENTORS AND EVALUATORS SOUGHT

4) GETTING STARTED WITH A SOCIAL MEDIA PLAN

5) BEYOND SLIDESHOWS – TIPS FOR WEB-BASED PRESENTATIONS

6) LEGAL REFERENCE IN NON-LAW LIBRARIES

7) ATTEND THE OCLC AMERICAS REGIONAL COUNCIL MEETING

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The Washington Library Association hosted a great webinar today with Mary Ross, who talked about how to effectively create audience-focused presentations. The tips that Mary suggests seem spot on, and I’m including them with my notes below in the hope that they will be useful to Washington library staff who want to step up the interactivity and quality of their presentations.

About 50 librarians attended the webinar, which seemed like a great number to me. If you were one of them, please share your thoughts in the comments below. Whether or not you were able to attend, what do you think? Are your presentations really focused on your audience? What could you be doing better to make sure your presentations are meeting audience needs? What are you already doing that’s awesome?

My notes from the webinar (after the break):

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