All posts by cmleguestblogger

Our guest bloggers bring a variety of great experience that is valuable to libraries! If you want to contribute a Guest Blog, just contact us!
Guest Blogger, Special

CMLE Mini Grant: Photography Preservation at Stearns History Museum

This is a guest post written by Steve Penick, Archivist at the Stearns History Museum. Need a mini-grant to help purchase new materials or help fund a program? Apply now!

What were your favorite takeaways or new things learned?

Perhaps the most rewarding part of the CMLE grant hinges on our ability to serve future audiences, not only within the museum, but beyond to the broader world.  This vision includes access to our collections, preservation aspects, and potential projects as defined within our Strategic Plan.

Various mediums may include online exhibits, social media, and published works. In its most utilitarian form, purchasing these archival supplies enables SHM to better preserve and access the Myron Hall Photographic Collection by reducing direct staff handling of these images.  It also creates an improved storage environment and an opportunity to assign a specific retrieval number on each negative sleeve.

These exciting initiatives ultimately reach the community we serve. Our library and archival mission emphasizes preserving images, creating more avenues for access, and as a vehicle to interpret the past.

  • Negative sleeves to preserve photos
    Negative sleeves
  • Negative sleeves and current storage boxes
  • Sleeves and negatives
  • The project!

As a result of purchasing these materials, can you identify and explain a few things you can use/apply to your work or practice?

Purchasing these archival supplies follows SHM’s preservation strategy.  This first step, in an ongoing practice to improve our collection storage environment, will increase the likelihood that these images are available for our audience decades into the future.

The project also ushers in related preservation plans such as digitization. Any future projects of this nature reduce the likelihood that negatives will be mixed up during scanning and processing. 

Combining all of these benefits, CMLE’s grant encompasses more than just archival supplies and their preservation advantages. It allows our grant to reach the community on a direct level now and well into the future.

Check this out:, Children's services

Report from EdCamp MidMN

Nearly 60 educators joined us for EdCampMidMN 5.0 in Princeton, MN. Princeton Public School’s singing superintendent kicked our day off with a singalong as attendees enjoyed coffee donated by Jules Cafe and donuts donated by Kwik Trip. After two rounds of sessions attendees joined back together for lunch from the PIzza Barn and conversations. We had two more rounds of sessions while enjoying snacks from Benetech! Our day closed with prizes in the main rooms with top prizes like a free registration to the Impact Education Conference and Transforming Learning Summit and hands-on tools like Makey Makey! The day wouldn’t be possible without the generous support of our sponsors like CMLE!

Here is what attendees are saying about EdCampMidMN 5.0:

“What did you enjoy most about EdCampMidMN 5.0?”

  • Networking with other professionals and the content of the sessions.
  • I enjoyed the sessions that were available to attend. I got something from each one that I feel I can take back to the classroom.
  • I love connecting with other teachers and gaining new ideas
  • I came without anyyyyyone.. I got to connect with new people because I forced myself to spend the time learning with teachers I didn’t know before today!
  • Hearing ideas from other excited teachers – inspired creativity.
  • I enjoyed the variety of sessions and the small groups really made for in-depth discussions. I also appreciate having access to the notes from the sessions that I couldn’t attend.

“What great ideas or take aways did you walk away with today?”

  • I learned more about various resources that I can check into. It helped to fill in some of the blanks on what I didn’t know that I didn’t know about.
  • Starting to think about incorporating robotics into my classroom in the subjects I teach.
  • I like being able to play with tech in the Maker Space.
  • From the Digital Citizenship I learned about other teacher and school policies for phone use in the classroom. It was a great discussion and reminder that we need to help kids learn to use their phone as a tool and not misuse it. Also teach them the skills about when and when not to be on your screen.
  • Picked up new ideas for motivating students using different apps and sites and lastly talked to a teacher outside of a regular session who showed me how to use HP View to create a virtual museum.

Check out our notes documents to dig into topics that were shared:

Conference, Guest Blogger

Bethany’s Report from Teen Lit Con 2019!

This is a guest blog post written by Bethany Kauffman, CMLE Board Member and Media Specialist at Rogers High School. Need a mini grant to help fund a program for your community? Apply now!

What is the Teen Literature Convention?

“The Twin Cities Teen Lit Con is where authors, books, teens, & fun collide. There will be amazing authors, breakout sessions, & an action-packed Exhibit Hall (book arts, book signings, & much more). Teens have the opportunity to connect with their favorite authors, explore other aspects of being a part of a reading community, & attend workshops for writers.” (https://teenlitcon.org/faqs-2/)

We had another great day at Teen Lit Con on April 27, 2019.  “We” is our group of three high schools that attended together through a grant from CMLE.  Upsala High School, Sauk Rapids Rice High School and Rogers High School staff and students road one bus together to Henry Sibley High School in Mendota Heights for the big day!

The three high schools had 30 students attend and three adults which we considered a good turn out on a busy Saturday.  The bus ride gave students and staff a chance to chat and get to know each other which was one of our goals in riding together.  There aren’t enough opportunities for students from different areas of MN who share a love of reading and writing to meet each other.  Thank you to CMLE for making this possible!

Once at Sibley High School, the fun began.  We attended a panel discussion with the nationally known authors Lamar Giles, Tomi Adeyemi, Becky Albertalli and Jarrett Krosoczka.  What an entertaining and informative group of authors! The attendees did a lot of cheering. You would have thought we were at a rock concert.

There were numerous sessions students could attend throughout the day including Book Fued, Writer’s Studio, Social Justice and Activism in YA Lit, Pie Club – Finding Your Next Book, Graphic Storytelling and more.  Students also participated in a variety of exhibits and hands-on activities. Waiting in line to get the authors’ signatures was a part of the day for almost everyone, too.

We all arrived back at our individual school by late afternoon/early evening feeling really tired but happy.  Thank you again CMLE for making this trip possible for our teens!

Programs, Public, School Media Specialist

Report from Youth Services Librarian Meetup!

This is a Guest Post from Bethany Kauffman, CMLE Board Member and Media Specialist at Rogers High School

Greater Together: Expanding Partnerships

Librarians from across the center of MN gathered in Chaska for a rare opportunity for school librarians and public librarians to meet, talk to each other about library services and learn from each other about collaborations happening between libraries and community organizations. Librarians from Hennepin, Anoka, Scott and Dakota Counties discussed how they are improving services to patrons by working together and gave specific examples of the benefits youth in MN are receiving, as a result.

We met on Tuesday, April 16 at the lovely Minnesota Landscape Arboretum and started our day with spectacular goodies provided by North Lights Library Network and Central Minnesota Libraries Exchange.  We had updates on state library services, including information about the new eLibrary portal that will be replacing ELM. After the panel discussions, there was time for one-on-one networking.

Several of us took time to visit the absolutely phenomenal Andersen Horticultural Library which contains nearly 20,000 books specific to horticulture, botany, landscape architecture and local natural history.  I had no idea that the library was home to a commissioned set of furnishings designed and built by the famous architect and woodworker George Nakashima. Simply breathtaking.

If you didn’t get to attend this Meet-up, watch for one in the future.  As a school librarian, I had a wonderful time and would definitely attend again.

Conference, Guest Blogger, School Media Specialist, Young Adults

Report from Teen Lit Con 2019!

This is a guest post from Stephanie Schlangen, Instructional Coach – Technology Integration at Sauk Rapids – Rice High School. Need a Mini Grant to purchase materials or try an interesting new program at your library? Apply today!

Thanks to CMLE, Sauk Rapids-Rice, Upsala, and Rogers students were able to attend the Teen Lit Conference, an annual event held at Henry Sibley High School.  At this fantastic event, we were able to meet several different authors writing for young adults.  All of the authors talked about how they worked to bring new perspectives to the forefront of young adult literature. 

Lamar Giles talked about his #weneeddiversebooks movement.  A pivotal point for him was when he was a young adult and went to his local librarian to ask her for a book featuring an African-American protagonist, and the only books she could lead him to were Roots and the Autobiography of Malcolm X.  When he showed the following image, it became very clear that this sort of experience is common for many.

Tomi Adeyemi, the author of Children of Blood and Bone, also emphasized the need for literature to feature characters with diverse perspectives.  She said one of her main goals was to make people fall in love with a character that was different than them. 

Becky Albertalli, author of Simon vs. The Homosapien Agenda, and What If It’s Us? spoke about how she drew from life experience in her writing, including difficult situations with her father and with current political events.

Likewise, author of Hey Kiddo, Jarrett Krosoczka, in his graphic memoir, also drew from painful memories in order to write this book.  He likened the writing experience to Harry Potter writing with the blood quill, where it hurt a lot to go through the memories of growing up with a mother addicted to heroin. However, after he finished he felt a great burden was lifted off of him.  It was also very interesting to hear him speak about how the choices he made with the illustrations in his book were intentional down to the specific colors he chose, and the fact that he made them with ink rather than digitally.

All of these authors offered new perspectives to our students and reinforced the idea that, in a library, we need to provide windows and mirrors for all of our students.