Head for the Edge, Library Media Connection, September 2008
You Know You’re a Librarian in 2008 when…you know more librarians in Texas than you do in your home state because of LM_Net.
Peter Milbury and Mike Eisenberg, the founders and moderators par excellence of LM_Net for the past 15 years, announced last November that they are passing the torch.
For the one or two of you reading this who don’t know about LM_Net, it has been the mainstay electronic mailing list for an estimated 100 million school librarians in 2 million countries, on a dozen other planets, and at least two identified alternative universes. It produces in excess of a billion e-mail messages each day - 10 billion on “recipe day.” (These numbers are rough estimates.)
I was an early subscriber and participant on LM_Net using my university “vax” account back in 1992 when I first joined. This was 1200 baud modem dial-up, line interface, pre-WWW, uphill-both-directions-in-the-snow Internet days. Not soft and cushy like young‘uns have it today with your graphical interfaces and wirelessness. The computer screen was hard to read by lamplight, too.
Anyway, LM_Net became my first Internet “continuing education” experience. And the learning began early.
It was my second year as library media supervisor and I was getting lots of push-back from the district librarians I had inherited. I was determined to make them tech integration specialists and they seemed just as determined to remain print-only librarians. After one particularly frustrating day, I turned on my computer, opened my e-mail, and just let rip about the reactionary, troglodytic, myopic, nature of school librarians, concluding that they had better damn well wake-up and smell the coffee or they would all be replaced with techs and not to let the door hit ‘m where the good lord split’m on the way out. And off the rant went to LM_Net.
Let me put it this way - I got some reaction. I knew librarians had good vocabularies, but even I learned some new words. I believe after that other LM_Netters opened my e-mails simply wondering what idiotic thing I might say next. In LM_Net I found my voice.
But more importantly, I found colleagues who offered information, encouragement, and support. It was my first true “continuous learning” experience not because I was the one doing the teaching, but because we were all learning together – as we do to this day. The virtual community built by LM_Net (a professional learning community before they were so named) was a lifeline and sanity-keeper for many of us.
Continuing education prior to LM_Net consisted of reading professional journals, attending library conferences, and taking college classes. These activities are still available and important. But given the pace and amount of change, they alone are insufficient to keep most of us current with the happenings in librarianship and information technology. Thank goodness for these online continuing education options:
These are just a few of the growing number of “continuous learning” opportunities the Internet is making available to those of us engaged in the rapidly evolving field of school librarianship.
Does your school’s mission statement include the words “life-long learning?” It should. And the sentiment should also apply to us as well.