All posts by Mary Jordan

Cataloging Basics: RDA for Beginners

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    Wednesday, April 12, 2023 9:00am – 11:00am

        Registration closes Tuesday, April 11, 2023

        Have you ever wondered about the mysteries of the cataloging universe? Take a trip through the basics and beyond, exploring the history, development, philosophy, and conceptual models of Resource Description and Access (RDA), the current cataloging standard. We will take a tour of the RDA Toolkit and have the chance to work on some exercises to familiarize ourselves with the material. 

        Who Should Attend?  

        Staff responsible for or interested in original cataloging, or description of resources in general. Some familiarity with cataloging concepts will help with understanding, but no experience is required. 
         

        Presenters

        Lizzy Baus

        Happiness in the Library: Build Some Resilience

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        It’s a tough time for libraries, and people in customer service. And while we don’t want to veer into any toxic positivity, it is good to spend a little time focused on building your happiness level. We are not going to solve people’s serious mental issues here. But bringing some happiness skills to your week can be helpful to everyone!

        Mondays can be a little hard, even when things are going fine. Use this small injection of a happiness skill to your week. We are here to support you, and to help you to be a little happier in the library.

        Even with a deliberate focus on being happier at work, hard/bad/sad things will continue to happen. We can’t “happy” our way out of it all of our problems, unfortunately; but we can keep working on our resilience skills. Learning to be better able to let problems just roll away from us gives us more room to have happiness in our lives.

        Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) is an evidence-based therapy approach that is problem-oriented and practical in providing people with long-term skills for mental health. This approach helps us understand how our thoughts, feelings, and behaviours are all inter-linked.

        So, how do we “let go” and disentangle from these automatic negative thoughts? Below are three fun, science-based ways that can help us untangle from our automatic negative thoughts and shift to enjoying the holidays and reducing our stress. While we may still experience some stress, the idea is that our stress is more manageable and we are more mindful of when we need to pause and tune in.

        • Noticing, labelling, and “BIH BOH”: Noticing some of our automatic negative thoughts and accompanying feelings, such as catastrophizing (“I’ve burnt the turkey; the entire dinner will now be ruined!”) plays a key role in managing our anxiety. By noticing these thoughts, we can catch ourselves before we spiral out of control.
        • Let it be: Typically, when we encounter thoughts that we do not like, we may use some creative strategies to not think about these thoughts. Distraction is a common way to take our minds off unwanted and negative thoughts and feelings. Yet, a growing body of research shows the effectiveness of “letting go” of these thoughts in contributing to mental well-being. The ability to simply notice a thought and acknowledge, “I am having the thought that…” builds resilience.
        • Mind-body connection: Tuning in and being mindful of not just our thoughts and feelings, but also how they are expressed in our body, is helpful in supporting both our mental and physical health.”

        You can read the whole article here, to get more details!

        CMLE can be part of your support network; we are here for you, and support you in your library work. Take a nice deep breath in, and whoosh it out; it’s going to be okay today.

        Why Banning ChatGPT in Class Is a Mistake

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        If you haven’t checked out ChatGPT yourself, give it a try! I’ve used it for some editing, which has been surprisingly helpful for me. I’ve tried to ask it to do some original writing, and that did not work out really well for my work – but other people have had some different experiences. Try it for yourself!

        We all know that trying to just outright censor things is not a great idea – not a workable strategy. (Yep: talking to you, Book-Banning-Twits out there. You aren’t going to win. We all know you are ridiculous.) And that foolishness in banning things extends to AI tools.

        Instead, thinking about ways to incorporate it into learning and the classroom will be better for students and for instructors! Check out the ideas in this article excerpt, and read the whole thing here.

        “If you’re an educator and you haven’t lived under a blanket for the past couple months, you have likely heard of ChatGPT. ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence based jack-of-all-trades. You can ask it a question and it will give you a thoughtful, clear, and impressive answer (better than Google!). You can prompt it to write a poem, research paper, book proposal, script, or short story and it does so with ease. I asked it about the protein that I studied for my doctoral research and ChatGPT taught me two things that I didn’t previously know. I asked it to write a short story about two people who develop a deep friendship over flipped learning and, by halfway through, I was engrossed in the plot — forgetting that it was written by a computer. If you haven’t given ChatGPT a try yet, pause your reading of this article right now and give it a whirl. ChatGPT is amazing, terrifying, awe-inspiring, troubling, and just simply fascinating all in one go.

        What did you think? Crazy, isn’t it? ChatGPT is remarkable in the cogent flow of writing that it can produce, the accuracy (mostly) of the information it provides, and the granular stipulation of prompts that it can accommodate. It’s the ideal student, writing well and effortlessly on any topic that we throw at it. After first seeing what ChatGPT could do, my mind began racing for possible applications in the college classroom.

        As I began looking online to see what other educators were saying about ChatGPT, I was initially surprised and then reminded of the predominant mindset of education. Despite our preening of the opposite, educators are often anti-tech (when that tech is new and different). At the time of this writing, all schools across the huge system of New York City public education are officially banned from using or having access to ChatGPT; it has been firewalled. Students at Princeton University have already begun petitioning their administration not to ban ChatGPT, and English teachers at my own daughters’ high school have already announced that all essays will now be written in class in real time. Are we serious, fellow educators? Are we really trying to delude ourselves that we’ll be able to keep this technology away from our students? We’ve made these mistakes before.

        “So let’s model that, coach it and teach it to our students — the editing and analyzing of AI-generated writing. Instead of banning AI in the college classroom, I’m planning to create assignments where students must prompt ChatGPT to draft a research paper, opinion piece, or reflection, and then the student must source that paper and fact-check it as the human component of the assignment. Another idea that I’m toying with is breaking students into groups and assigning each opposing perspectives of controversial topics. Those groups would then use ChatGPT to draft talking points related to their assigned positions, and use those talking points as starting points for real time, in-class discussions. A third idea: Have students write a short paper on an assigned topic and use ChatGPT to do the same. Students then exchange these paper-pairs (one human-written and the other AI) and do a peer-review of both papers in the pair, trying to identify which is ChatGPT and why they think so. The common theme in all of these assignment ideas is the analysis of the product created by ChatGPT. Thinking critically about the content that AI produces will be essential for the next generation, and we should be teaching it today. Educators avoid this path at the peril of our own obsolescence; something higher education is already at far too much risk of already.”

        Read the whole article here!

        Episode 10-09: Romance and Romance-Adjacent Programs

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        Welcome to Season Ten of Linking Our Libraries! We are so happy to have you join us again! This is the Central Minnesota Libraries Exchange, and our members are all types of libraries and their staff. It’s so good to have you here also. In this podcast, we talk about the skills library staff need to be successful and to help them to serve their communities.

        This season we are talking about library programs – giving you some ideas about different ideas you can try in your own library. It is always good to share ideas across libraries, and we are all better! Each week we will look at a different theme of programs.

        This week we are feeling a little mushy from the effects of Valentine’s Day! Of course, we do not limit ourselves to some forced idea of romance – how dull. Instead we take the expansive definition of relationships and love and happiness! We love libraries and books so much; but other readers and library people are also pretty great. So this week, let’s look at some programs you may want to try in your library to build some relationships in the library.

        Check out our show notes page here, to get all the material we discussed today and links to everything.

        2023 Rainbow Book List is Announced!

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        Whooo!!! We love to celebrate book awards, and books!!! No library has a bunch of extra money to throw around on books; so buying some award winning books can take the guesswork out of the process.

        And of course: we always support buying books across a wide range of patron experiences. We always want to be sure our patrons have access to stories that represent their interests, as well as stories that allow them to learn about other people’s lives and to build their sense of empathy.

        You can find the whole list of winners here!

        Check out the press release from the Rainbow Book List:

        “The 2023 Rainbow Book List Committee is honored to announce this year’s list. Composed of over 190 books for young readers from birth to age 18, the 2023 list represents an array of diverse stories and identities representing the LGBTQIA+ youth experience in books published from July 1, 2021 to December 31, 2022. 

        The importance of this list (and others like it) cannot be understated, especially in a time when we are seeing a record number of efforts to ban both materials and support for LGBTQIA+ young people and their families. It is our hope that our efforts to identify appealing and high quality queer books for youth will help young people, librarians, educators, and caregivers of all kinds to connect our readers with information and stories that are critical to their well being and growth. The suppression of these books is a detriment to all youth, and we cannot ignore the damage these challenges are having on the young people in our society. We know that there are individuals who will try to censor these books, but we offer this carefully curated list to the multitude of youth advocates working in our communities to connect young readers to the books that they so desperately need. This collection of titles is an invitation for all readers to create a more welcoming future for everyone. 

        It has been encouraging to see the increase in quality queer titles being published each year, and with that in mind, the 2023 committee has continued to offer two top ten lists. The Top Ten Titles for Young Readers are intended for young people from birth to middle school, and the Top Ten Titles for Teen Readers are for a young adult audience. Within the annotated list, an asterisk (*) indicates that a title has been selected for one of the top ten lists. 

        On behalf of the 2023 Rainbow Book List Committee, thank you for your interest in this list. We hope that it will connect readers of all ages and identities to the queer voices and experiences that many are trying to silence. 

        The Rainbow Book List is brought to you by the Rainbow Round Table of the American Library Association. This year’s committee researched and evaluated over 550 titles in order to find some of the best queer books written for children and teens.”

        You can find the whole list of winners here!