Downtown "Fieldtrip"

Daily Hours: 3
Total Hours: 89

Today I took a trip downtown to the Central Branch to meet with both Tana Elias, the Digital Services & Marketing Manager for MPL, and Trent Miller, who is charge of the Bubbler Program.  Tana and I sat down with my Friends Facebook page open and talked about some of the inner-workings of social media at MPL.  She also gave me a quick primer on the MPL Flickr account and how to deal with permissions when taking photos etc.  Apparently, the city is moving towards a "verbal agreement" system; just offering the person being photographed (or their parent/guardian) the option to "opt out" is enough.  It's good to see that the majority of MPL's social media strategies match right up with much of what we discussed in the social media class I took earlier in the summer!  Tana also gave me a quick tour of the library.  It was especially nice since, I'm embarrassed to admit, I haven't spent too much time at the Central Branch (Monroe St. is my main branch).  I hadn't actually been down in the Children's area and seen the reading caves and wicker huts yet; they're great! 

Then I met with Trent about Bubbler Logistics.  It was interesting to talk to him about how much they have learned in the past year of the program; he said it was basically like starting up your own brand new art gallery/library from scratch.  Originally, they had wanted to do all the branding centrally, so they were asking branches to send their program information to the Bubbler, and then the team would produce all the media and PR for the event.  But they just didn't have enough staff to do it right, and sometimes branches would only get the advertising materials a few days before the event.  So now, with my program as one of the first impetuses, Trent has just shared a poster-making template in the Bubbler Google Doc Folder that all branches can use locally.  So it looks like I'll be learning a bit about Microsoft Publisher while I make up the poster this week! For the remainder of my "shift" I sent out logistical emails regarding the fermentation program to get everyone on the same page now that I met with Trent.  I am looking forward to getting the poster out there this week and really getting things rolling!