October's iHCPL: We'll Make Your Pet a Star!

This month's module is one for the animal lovers. We'll start the month with submitting entries for the HCPL Cutest Pet contest, then look at finding a pet online, pet health, dealing with the loss of a pet, and end with social petworking. Completion of all four posts in this module will earn 2 hours of training credit for library staff.

With the proliferation of cute animal sites available now, you no longer have to wait for Aunt Betty to send you the latest batch of pictures of dogs dressed up in Halloween costumes for your "awww..." fix. You can visit Cute Overload for the motherload of cuteness from the entire animal kingdom, complete with funny captions. LOL people can go to I Can Has Cheezburger? for cats or I Has a Hotdog! for dogs. Baby animals are always popular, and so are The Daily Puppy and Kittenwar. But, wait, where do we go for local cuteness?

Mirror, Mirror, on the wall, who's the cutest pet of all?

We know there are many adorable pets in HCPL families and each one of us thinks that ours is the cutest. Just for fun this month, let's put it to a vote! Anyone who would like to participate should put a picture of their pet(s) in the iHCPL Pet Parade folder on the S: drive by October 16th. Please name your file with your pet's name-your name (example: Charlie-Linda Stevens). If you have more than one pet, you can submit more than one entry or you can put them all together in one photo for a big bang of cute. Voting will take place on Harriet from October 19th through the 30th and a winner will be announced at the end of the month. If the number of entries is large, we'll split the voting by type of pet. If not, dogs, cats, birds, fish, lizards, rabbits and hamsters will all compete against each other for the coveted title of "HCPL's Cutest Pet."

The pet contest is for fun, so you can participate without doing the rest of the module and exercises, or you can get credit for the Pets module and exercises without entering the contest.

Please contact Linda Stevens with any questions and check back on Monday for an actual learning post, "Finding a Pet Online."

This month's posts are brought to you by Linda Stevens, Kathleen Green, Beth Krippel and Daisy Torres.
Photos copyright JupiterImages.com