Wednesday, March 01, 2006

We Love Stories

Especially happy ones. I am pulling this one from our comments, specifically, George's post about the Montana OFFLINE conference. K-12 librarian Lyn McKinney left this note:

"It was really a treat for us to hear some the wisest library thinkers share ideas that got us thinking. I have to tell you that thanks to all of you - I took your ideas to my principal yesterday and was talking to him about the application of the flat world concept in education. We had a great conversation.

Two hours later he called me and said that a local telecommunications company wanted to donate $2,000.00 to our school and he couldn't think of a better place to put the money! So we got two thousand dollars yesterday to purchase some technology upgrades for the library! The most ironic part of this story is that the people who came to bring us the check and take the photo for publicity were not from that telecommunications company - they were from an advertising company outsourced to give away the money - the world really is flat!

One last comment - you are so right about Bruce Newell and his contributions that benefit library users in Montana and in this flat world, all library users. Bruce sees Montana for what it is - a big space with a small population - and has helped us build on the principals of trust and doing what is best for our users. He understands that we are all in this together - and building on his latest mantra, "hope trust and guts" we will continue Montana's rich history of service to library users everywhere."

As you'll see though, from this article (a few years old), Lyn and her colleague Jan Allen are seasoned "change-agents". I'm sure she didn't really need our ideas to convince her principal that Lyn and Jan's library is a wise place to invest windfalls. But it's a good story!

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