Leveraging Social Media to Support a Library Levy Campaign

In November 2015, voters in Washington County, Oregon, approved a 5-year replacement levy to support countywide library services (Measure 34-235), with 64 percent voting in favor of the measure. As a unique partnership between our county, nine municipalities, and two nonprofit organizations, Washington County Cooperative Library Services (WCCLS) organized a successful levy education effort specifically for social media for its twelve member libraries. With the passing of Measure 34-235, WCCLS member libraries are now positioned to continue providing the best possible library service to our patrons for the next five years

Growth, OLAQ Spring 2015, Volume 21 Issue 1

Publisher note: An updated version of the Slater, L. article was added 6.23.2015

Learning to Segment Every Thing

Most methods for object instance segmentation require all training examples to be labeled with segmentation masks. This requirement makes it expensive to annotate new categories and has restricted instance segmentation models to ~100 well-annotated classes. The goal of this paper is to propose a new partially supervised training paradigm, together with a novel weight transfer function, that enables training instance segmentation models on a large set of categories all of which have box annotations, but only a small fraction of which have mask annotations. These contributions allow us to train Mask R-CNN to detect and segment 3000 visual concepts using box annotations from the Visual Genome dataset and mask annotations from the 80 classes in the COCO dataset. We evaluate our approach in a controlled study on the COCO dataset. This work is a first step towards instance segmentation models that have broad comprehension of the visual world

Start-up Library: A Report from the Aloha Community Library

“Do you have any idea of what is going on in Aloha? ” is how Oregon State Librarian MaryKay Dahlgreen began her speech at the Grand Opening of the Aloha Community Library on September 22, 2012 (Squires, Oct. 4, 2012). The people of Aloha, Oregon have united in an incredibly determined effort to create a library that will serve as a learnin

Want to Make Your Website Better? Ask a Librarian.

Raise your hand if you have served on a committee in your library. If your hand isn’t raised, just give it some time … libraries definitely like committee work. For instance, I recently had the opportunity to work with a committee consisting mostly of librarians. When the committee’s goals were accomplished, my non-librarian coworker commented that “Librarians sure have a lot of opinions.” Since this article is about usability testing, and is written by and for librarians, let’s test his hypothesis. Let’s also test a few other hypotheses about librarians while we’re at it. (Disclaimer: In this article, “librarians” include staff who work in libraries, and has nothing to do with degrees or job classifications.) Washington County Cooperative Library Services (WCCLS) is a Cooperative of 13 member libraries and two special libraries, each uniquely governed and operated. WCCLS is a primary funding source for member libraries, and our WCCLS “Office” provides other support such as daily courier deliveries, cataloging coordination, and e-book collections. The WCCLS website and Extranet are two other ways the WCCLS Office supports member libraries in Washington County. The WCCLS Extranet is a repository of policies, procedures, and committee meeting documents. It also includes training and promotional materials for WCCLS resources, as well as opportunities for sharing ideas

Connecting with Our Communities with Empathy, Compassion, and Kindness: Marketing and Outreach Inside and Outside Library Buildings

By listening to and understanding the perspectives of people in their communities, libraries can gain valuable insight into their patrons’ needs. Through thoughtful outreach and marketing, libraries can ensure that patrons feel seen and heard, creating an environment of trust and understanding. Libraries can also use this insight to create programming and services tailored to the needs of their communities

The Crescent - January 1893

Volume 4, Number 4https://digitalcommons.georgefox.edu/the_crescent/1010/thumbnail.jp