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Quick Review of Our 2022

We had a busy year of sharing information and library ideas! Of course, the best part of our work is participating in the wider library community, and working with you – our members!

Thank you to all of our library members, who have shared their experiences and ideas with us. Thank you to the wider Minnesota library community, because this is such a vibrant place to work – filled with library love. Thank you to our Board members who have been here for a while, who have (sadly!) left our service, and who have recently joined us.

And, a specific thank you to you – reading this at this moment. You are a great part of the community, and it’s so nice to be here with you right now, working on library ideas and skills! We have more community work coming up this year, and it will be great to have you participating in it!

Last year we had 17,709 views of our site, with 10, 693 visitors. Lovely to see you all!

A few of our more popular articles from our blog and weekly newsletter this year are:

We also put out two podcasts every single week – regardless of snow, sleet, hail, holidays, or pandemics! You can subscribe in your favorite podcast app, or stream them on our website. You can also read our show notes of the episodes, where we not only keep all the material we discuss but also all the links to things we share.

Our reader’s advisory/ book group podcast is Reading With Libraries.

Season Nine was another fun one, with the prompts from the 2022 Pop Sugar reading challenge serving as the basis for our weekly book chats. There were tons of resources shared, books discussed, and of course we had our themed beverages every week!

Our second podcast is Linking our Libraries. We talk about library skills and ideas to help build libraries.

This season we focused on topics that are important to library support staff. We discussed each of the ten competency sets in the American Library Association’s Library Support Staff Certification program. Some of these may overlap with prior episodes, but this season looked specifically at the material the ALA has identified as important. We will link to the ALA’s program, if you want more information or want to sign up for one of their classes. 

These are our Thursday episodes, where we talk about the main library content. One plays, and one is on hiatus. But, of course, we don’t want to lose anyone or to let anyone get bored! So every Tuesday, on the podcast feed that doesn’t have a Thursday episode, we drop a short book recommendation episode. You can subscribe to the two feeds, or just check out our Browsing Books page to listen and get all the book ideas!

We have a focus on Minnesota topics in this podcast. We looked at all the state parks, and suggested books to celebrate them. Then we looked at all the counties of the state, and celebrated books together. And now we are looking at all the historic sites in the state, and suggest books to go with each of them.

Here is last season:

Thank you again to everyone who has been part of our community! It has been wonderful to have you here. And we are looking forward to an even happier 2023 ahead!