Application Deadline: Five Weeks to a Social Library

I just wanted to remind folks that December 1 is the deadline for applications to participate in the Five Weeks to a Social Library course. You can find the application instructions here.

We have gotten an incredible number of applications for the course from people all over the world — from all different types of libraries and points in their career (from students to library directors). I wish we could accept everyone who wants to take part, but there are only 40 slots for the course. If you don’t get accepted into the program, you still can participate in the course on your own. Please consider starting your own blog on WordPress.com or Blogger (or any other free hosted blog platforms) and following along with the class. All of the Webcasts, podcasts and screencasts will be made available online as well as the reading lists. You can read what the participants are writing about on their blogs and will be able to comment on their blog posts. You could even get a group of people together at your library and have your own little class using our content!

In order to be transparent, I’ll let you know how we plan to choose our participants. We’re basing our decision primarily on three factors: 1) professional development support from employer (primarily financial), 2) the benefit to the individual (how much they already know about social software, how enthusiastic they are to learn this stuff), and 3) the benefit to their library (how they might use what they’ve learned, whether other people there already know about social software, etc.). Even with some guidelines, it’s going to be difficult to make these decisions with so many terrific applicants.