In honor of my LIS 5661 government documents class, I share with thee such splendor.

King was recently part of their conversation series, which also includes other big-time library peeps  such as Michael Stephens, Helene Bowers, Stephen Abram, and ACPL’s director Jeff Kruhl (part 1, part 2). I love this conversation series because it allows lil’ folks like myself the opportunity to hear these great speakers talk about their experiences. I am a big believer in learning from others’ experiences, and these videos offer a brief opportunity to do that.

Beyond their conversation series, the ACPL reaches out to their constituents via other videos. These videos provide opportunities for connection and transparency with their community.

A few examples of other short videos offered by the ACPL:

• The state of the library – good to know in these tough economic times, especially with all the news and rumors about library closings, budget slashing, etc. In this video, the director addresses recent changes the library is facing due to a local property tax increase that has gone into effect.

• Why I love being a librarian – what a great way for the ACPL community to connect to their librarians by seeing why their librarians love their job!

• Geek Out – is a new series from ACPL of monthly training videos offered to ACPL staff. Its focus is technology in libraries.

• What’s Happening at the ACPL – weekly videos about what’s going on in the library (example is for March 16).

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3p83pNZdmhQ]

I’ve had a chance to peruse through the Senate and House YouTube sites and really like what I see. You can click on a state and a bubble pops up with the Senator or Congressperson’s name. Click on the name and you can see their channel. Of course I checked out Oregon Senator Ron Wyden’s page (or “channel”) and was able to read all about him, learn about his interests, constituents, etc and watch plenty of videos. I think this is a pretty cool way to learn about our government officials rather than soley reading about them.

It looks like a few officials don’t have channels or sites uploaded yet.  (Curiously, I checked for the state of Illinios to see if Roland Burris had a channel yet but I realize he was only sworn in last week so I’m probably getting ahead of myself. I notice new Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley doesn’t have a site yet either… it’s probably too early).

Updated 6/30/09

It has been widely noted how Barack Obama has utilized technology and social media to educate and inform U.S. citizens about his campaign (just check out his YouTube channel and his Facebook, Twitter, MySpace pages).  In fact, some debate whether it made a difference in helping him win the election. Now he has a new site, change.gov which has the mission to inform the public of what’s going on as he prepares to take office this Tuesday, January 20th.

It looks like more government agencies are following Obama’s lead.

Government on Twitter – a few comprehensive sites with info:

• The Government’s A-Twitter: A Comprehensive List of Government Twitter Feeds – from Alexandra Rampy, aka socialbutterfly

• The US Government Catches the Twitter Bug, And Amazingly, Does it Well – from the Eric Krangel, Silicon Insider

• GovTwit Directory – BearingPoint Blog (updated 7/20/09 – GovTwit Directory is no longer affiliated with Bearing Point)

Update 1/22: Check out Tweet Congress. Includes statistics (e.g., see who’s the most followed, who tweets/who doesn’t, who tweets the most, etc.) and a nice search function to see which Congress-folk are using Twitter:  search by name, state, party. If your favorite Congressperson isn’t on there, it has an option to sign a petition in attempt to get them tweeting!

It is interesting to see the government utilizing social media in order to inform the public. It makes total sense, but it is amazing nonetheless!

Update 6/30/09: I discovered a new site called GovFresh that incorporates ALL live U.S. Government feeds ALL in one place: Twitter, YouTube, RSS, Facebook, Flickr accounts and more. They have it all: feeds from each branch in government, different agencies, departments, state governments, the military, contractors, political parties, news and so on…