FROM THE DESK OF THE STATE LIBRARIAN

This year's annual meeting of the New Hampshire Automated Information Systems Board (NHAIS) was held in Manchester on June 7th, 2007 at the Highlander Inn. This year's speaker was Rachel Van Noord from WebJunction (www.nh.webjunction.org). The State Library has been a Community partner with WebJunction for two years. The stated mission of WebJunction is to assist library personnel to share resources that enable them to embrace technology and apply it to daily work.

As one of the original community partners, the State Library recognized the promise of the WebJunction philosophy to train library staff to use technology to serve the needs of library users. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has contributed greatly to the development of WebJunction and has engaged the expertise of OCLC, the largest bibliographic utility in the world to make WebJunction work well.

Rachel Van Noord presented a PowerPoint presentation outlining current features of WebJunction and the proposed future developments. The purpose of using the NHAIS annual meeting for a discussion of WebJunction was to get as much input from New Hampshire librarians about what they find lacking in WebJunction and what enhancements they would like to see. You may find the PowerPoint presentation at http://nh.webjucntion.org/do/DisplayContent?id=17245.

Heather Shumway, Director of the Hooksett Public Library told the group how she uses WebJunction as a training tool with her staff.

-Michael York, State Librarian