"Senior Spaces" Update

Hi--

It's been a bit since I last added anything to this blog. I have been working with Mi-Sun Lyu, of Infolink on the new web page that will be premiering next week.

Here you will find a lot more detail about our "seniors spaces" project and more. I hope that you will look for it at: www.infolink.org/seniorspaces.

Several things have happened in the "space" in the last few weeks.

We had our first "official" Advisory Board Meeting in September and have our next meeting scheduled for Tuesday, October 9th. We are going to work on a survey with the Advisory Board to get some feedback on "programming" and the direction that should take.

Ellen O'Brien has become our very part-time "Senior Spaces" Librarian. Ellen has been a substitute librarian with the Library for the past year--now she has become a part-time Adult and Information Services Librarian. She will be working with me in the "senior spaces" area each Thursday and Friday. Today she developed the discussion piece for the film that we used on "The Homefront," during World War II. I thought that this month should have a 1940's theme to tie-in with Ken Burns' The War, showing on PBS. It went very well!

We spent yesterday and today developing and plotting out some programming ideas for the months to come. One of the new additions to our programming will be the planning of a Thursday night series aimed at the Baby Boomer generation.

Do you Wii? It is set to debut on Thursday, November 7th. We are working with out Teen Librarian, Theresa Wordelmann on that project. She is recruiting teen volunteers to assist
in training our older adults to use Wii. We also have several librarians with gaming experience and are tapping into their expertise and enthusiasm in getting this off the ground. At the moment we have 2 Wii consoles and plan to expand in the next coming months.

Last week, Ruthie Maslin, from the Lexington KY Public Library was our visitor. We gave her the Old Bridge tour, she had a chance to observe one of our Friday programs and tour "senior spaces." Soon you will be able to visit virtually from the Infolink website.

During the last two months we "tweeked" the room's arrangement to make some things flow better and now have an entire space devoted to "special needs." We would like to expand that through programming and developing a collection to meet those needs as well.

I am off next week to make a presentation for the Pennsylvania Library Association at their annual conference on "Senior Spaces" and then later in the week I am talking at the NY/NJ Chapter of MLA on Serving Baby Boomers and then off later in the month to Monterey, CA to speak at Internet Librarian on social networking and older adults. What a monthful!

Well, that's it for now. I promise this week to post most of my past presentations to both my own site at: libraryolderadults.blogspot.com and to the infolink.org/seniorspaces site. So look for them there. The more we share the more that will happen.

As always, you can find me at: Old Bridge Public Library, 732-721-5600, ext. 5042 or akleiman@oldbridgelibrary.org.

Chat with you soon,
Allan