LM_NET Hero, Milbury, Retires

Peter Milbury, former media specialist and cofounder of LM_NET, has just retired. And he’s handed over the reins of his popular discussion group—which now boasts more than 10,000 members.

Was it hard for you to give up LM_NET?

I started enjoying retirement from school. And about three months ago, I started thinking, “Oh, I could use some more time. And there are other things I want to do.” I have a part-time consulting job with the California Learning Resource Network—they review and post their reviews of electronic learning resources and electronic learning assessment resources—and that’s about as much energy I have for work now.

How did the idea for LM_NET come about?

I was on other [electronic] discussion groups for college librarians and K–12 teachers and just reading what they had to say. If I’d see a librarian had posted from another school, I’d just capture their address. Pretty soon, if I found new resources, I would share them with those folks. Eventually, I had 40 or 50 people. Mike Eisenberg, who was at Syracuse University at that time, had a similar group of email addresses from people he knew from various connections from ALA [American Library Association] and other places. His university had the capability of setting up a listserv, and he had heard about my list of people from a librarian in the Northeast.

Did you know Mike Eisenberg?

I had never even heard of him before. I was just sitting around on a Monday after school let out, checking my email and thinking, “What am I going to do this summer?” I really had a wide-open summer—and then I got this email from this guy I’d never heard of from Syracuse University introducing himself and asking, “Why don’t we merge our lists?” So we did.

Is LM_NET successful because it connects isolated school librarians?

That’s the key. Every so often we’d do a little survey, and we’d find out that isolation was a huge, huge issue because, as you know, oftentimes we’re the only one of our type in a school setting. Oftentimes—like people in California—we’re the only one in our whole school district. And there are a lot of states like that, and it’s hard to get to conferences.