PPO booth at the 2010 ALA Annual Conference.

PPO booth at the 2010 ALA Annual Conference.

What’s New in Programming Librarian

Angela Hanshaw | July 06, 2010

I’d like to thank everyone who attended the Programming Librarian demonstrations at the Public Programs Office booth and the “Are You a Programming Librarian?” program during the 2010 ALA Annual Conference. I really enjoyed introducing the site to programming librarians who weren’t familiar with it yet (but were happy to find out about it!) as well as receiving feedback from those who were. I was also happy to introduce some new features available on the site; here’s a quick recap in case you were unable to attend:

  • The Programming Librarian forum: One of the most frequent requests I hear from programming librarians is to offer networking and sharing. You can already do so by posting comments, of course, but now registered users are free to start their own topics, with their own questions and stories. If you aren’t registered, you’re still free to browse forum topics.

  • The PR Generator: Lacking the time or ability to make your own promotional materials? Let Programming Librarian help you. We’ve provided templates for flyers, bookmarks, and postcards that you can easily customize with your own text, images, and colors. Once you’re done, just sit back while a PDF is generated for you. Please note that you must be registered with Programming Librarian to use this feature.

  • The Brainstormer beta: Search for programming help and ideas. The information here is not limited to things found on Programming Librarian, but is a curated database of useful information from around the web. You can currently conduct “and” searches by selecting tags; we’ll be offering other search options, including text searching, in the future.

Please let me know what you think of these new features, including any recommendations for improving them, in the comments below or via email. And thanks for reading!


Angela Hanshaw is Program Officer/Web Editor for the ALA Public Programs Office.


Share Your Thoughts