Kim Beckman

SLM 521

Elelctive Activity

List Serv and eGroups

       I decided to join two list serv groups for an elective activity. I joined LM_NET. The other group I belong to is one at school for the media specialist. Mike Ficus started it in the fall.

         One of the things I like about the school list serv is that I can communicate with all the media specialist in Allegany County with one email. For example, when ever I get a new student at our school and I don’t know where the student was previously, I can send an email to all of them. It looks something like this: Did anyone have the student Jane Doe at their school? Could you please transfer their book account to my school. I’ve noticed that other media specialist use it the same way. The thing that I have to be careful about is not responding to an email that came via list serv because my response will go to all on the list. I recently read an email that was inviting another media specialist to her house for dinner.

The other list serv I belong to is LM_NET. This is a busy group. I actually get too many and rarely read them. I joined last year because someone suggested that new medai specialists should join this list serv group. At first it was interesting then I was overwhelmed. Some of the topics brought up were how to weed out old books, how to dispose the books you weed out. Most recently, Congress is presenting bill HR 2295. This bill wants to place a federal mandate on school library purchases. The deal is that your school will not get funds for books unless the school board sets up a panel to select books for the school libraries. Of course, ALA is asking all librarians to write to their congressperson.