Lori Bell, director of the Mid-Illinois Talking Book Center, in East Peoria, has won a rave for her work–in an article in Library Journal, appropriately headlined The Idea Generator. Along with Tom Peters, Lori is a familar name to TeleBlog readers for setting up book-oriented Netcasts for the vision-challenged. From LJ:
Anyone who hires Lori Bell is getting two librarians: one who enthusiastically does the job, and another who develops new ideas, secures grants to fund them, and swiftly puts the ideas into action.
There’s nothing that makes a job more attractive to Bell than the freedom to try out new things. Jenny Levine, Internet development specialist at Illinois’s Suburban Library System, says that wherever Bell has gone, ‘Boom! Suddenly that library is doing exciting new projects.’
Bell’s career has been remarkably eclectic. She’s been a children’s librarian, a reference librarian, an outreach librarian, a technology consultant for library systems, and a hospital librarian. The constant in all of this has been her love for ‘working with new technologies and identifying and using these in whatever library system I happen to be in.’
As director of automation services at Alliance Library System, East Peoria, IL, she wrote $1 million worth of successful technology grants, helped 45 rural and small-town libraries connect to the Internet, and coordinated several collaborative digitization projects, including ‘Illinois Alive!’ and ‘Early Illinois Women and Other Unsung Heroes.’ At the same time, she organized, and in many cases presented, 50 technology programs a year for member libraries. Bell also collaborated with academic libraries on one of the first 24/7 virtual reference projects.
Librarians fret all the time about their futures in the Net era. Lori, Tom, Jenny and a healthy number of young librarians are much-needed contrasts to the many Luddites still remaining. Yes, the Net has its flaws and is a library not, but librarians would do well to keep open minds and consider library-friendly approaches such as TeleRead–as opposed to just ranting against the inevitable without also suggesting solutions for very real shortcomings.
Another common problem among librarians: thinking that technology is forever frozen–and failing to understand that e-books are growing closer and closer to the readability of p-books. Yet another: letting vendors call the shots. I was delighted to read that some librarians are finally speaking up against the Tower of eBabel, as happened at a library conference sponsored by the Open eBook Forum.
Detail: The latest recognition for Lori follows a $10,000 award to the MITBC for the work that she and Tom Peters are doing to get e-books on the Net for the vision-challenged, in collaboration with OverDrive.
Know any Bell-style librarians who deserve recognition for tech-related work, especially in e-books? Email us.
