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 talking about a very standard library program: crafting and making! Check out our show notes page here.
You can get really fancy with this – even setting up an Etsy store to sell things. Or, you can hand out construction paper, glue, and glitter and let everyone go bananas. Today, we will talk about a few programs that are somewhere in the middle of these extremes – things you might want to try in your own library!
To keep costs down, you can buy your supplies in bulk. And when you have a following of people who come to your programs, ask them what kinds of things they want to do. Especially for those of us who are not naturally crafty, talking with people who are and who do a variety of things will be helpful for you in thinking of new things. And they may also want to donate some supplies to the library, to keep good things going.
Message from Tami Lee, Director of State Library Services On behalf of the staff at State Library Services, we would like to express our immense gratitude for the work that you do! 2022 has been a challenging year and Minnesota libraries of all types continue to meet these challenges with an unwavering dedication to providing innovative and equitable access to information, promoting civic and cultural engagement, supporting economic growth and facilitating lifelong learning. State Library Services looks forward to supporting the work of libraries, library staff and library support agencies in the coming year. Best wishes for the holiday season!
Updates from the State Early Learning Nature Series Embrace the winter through a new webinar series on outdoor and nature-based learning sponsored by the Early Learning Division at the Minnesota Department of Education. There are six webinars in all. Here are three upcoming webinars: Curriculum Planning & Assessment with Nature in Mind | January 23, 2023 | 6:30–8 p.m. Register for January 23 meeting Adventure One: Exploring Nature as a Teacher for Social Emotional Development and Social Systems | Monday, February 6, 2023 | 6:30–8 p.m. Register for February 6 meeting Adventure Two: Exploring Nature as a Teacher for Language, Literacy, Communication, Creativity and the Arts | Monday, February 27, 2023 | 6:30–8 p.m. Register for February 27 meeting
Internet for All: Connecting One Minnesota Mark your calendars for this event being held at Mystic Lake Casino Hotel on Wednesday, January 25, 2023. This event will bring together local governments, community leaders, industry, state and federal representatives, and other critical partners from around the state to learn about and discuss key programs that are aimed at expanding broadband infrastructure and promoting digital equity for our residents. This free event will be held in-person and virtually. For information about registering, stay tuned to the Office of Broadband Development.
Updates From Our Partners ALA Grants for Library Programming This could be your year! The American Library Association’s Public Programs Office just re-opened two annual grants dedicated to library programming and community engagement. The Libraries Transform Communities Engagement Grant will provide two libraries with $2,000 to expand their community engagement efforts. More details can be found here: https://www.ala.org/tools/programming/LTCEG. The Peggy Barber Tribute Grant aims to help ease library budget challenges by awarding three libraries $2,500 to support a proposed program, program series, or programming effort. More details can be found here: https://www.ala.org/tools/programming/PeggyBarberGrant Applications for both grants close on February 1, 2023. If you have questions about either opportunity, please email publicprograms@ala.org.
Native American Library Services Basic Grants The Institute of Museum and Library Services is now accepting applications for Native American Library Services Basic grants through March 1, 2023. Native American Library Services Basic grants are noncompetitive one-year grants of $6,000 to $10,000, which can include up to $3,000 in eligible professional education and assessment activities or travel. Grants may be used to buy library materials, renew subscriptions, fund salaries and training, provide internet connectivity and computers, or purchase library furnishings, for example. The grants are available to federally recognized Native American tribes and Native Alaskan villages, corporations, and regional corporations and are designed to support existing operations and maintain core services of tribal and Native village libraries. Potential applicants can learn more about the FY 2023 application process in an on-demand webinar. Application materials can be found on the grant program page. Back to TopPhoto/illustration credits: chicabubble, Camila Seves Espasandin
About State Library Services State Library Services, a division of the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE), partners with libraries to achieve equity and excellence in our collective work for Minnesotans. Division staff are consultants who help libraries plan, develop and implement high-quality services that address community needs. State Library Services administers federal grant, state aid, and state grant programs that benefit all types of libraries.
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.
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.
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!
Sure, your birthday is fun. Arbor Day means lots of nice trees. Fourth of July gives you the opportunity for fireworks.
But Public Domain day is the day we get out from under the weight of the idiocy of federal Copyright Law: yay!!!!
On January 1 of each year, the material that finally enters the public domain is available to all of us. We can copy it, perform it, sing it, draw it, adapt it – whatever we want!
“On January 1, 2023, copyrighted works from 1927 will enter the US public domain. 1 They will be free for all to copy, share, and build upon. These include Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse and the final Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle, the German science-fiction film Metropolis and Alfred Hitchcock’s first thriller, compositions by Louis Armstrong and Fats Waller, and a novelty song about ice cream. Please note that this site is only about US law; the copyright terms in other countries are different.
Here are just a few of the works that will be in the US public domain in 2023. 2 They were supposed to go into the public domain in 2003, after being copyrighted for 75 years. But before this could happen, Congress hit a 20-year pause button and extended their copyright term to 95 years. Now the wait is over. (To find more material from 1927, you can visit the Catalogue of Copyright Entries.)”
“Why celebrate the public domain? When works go into the public domain, they can legally be shared, without permission or fee. Community theaters can screen the films. Youth orchestras can perform the music publicly, without paying licensing fees. Online repositories such as the Internet Archive, HathiTrust, Google Books, and the New York Public Library can make works fully available online. This helps enable access to cultural materials that might otherwise be lost to history. 1927 was a long time ago. The vast majority of works from 1927 are out of circulation. When they enter the public domain in 2023, anyone can rescue them from obscurity and make them available, where we can all discover, enjoy, and breathe new life into them.
The public domain is also a wellspring for creativity. The whole point of copyright is to promote creativity, and the public domain plays a central role in doing so. Copyright law gives authors important rights that encourage creativity and distribution—this is a very good thing. But it also ensures that those rights last for a “limited time,” so that when they expire, works go into the public domain, where future authors can legally build on the past—reimagining the books, making them into films, adapting the songs and movies. That’s a good thing too! Think of all the films, cartoons, video games, books, plays, and other works based on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) or Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (1865).”
Here are a few books :
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
Arthur Conan Doyle, The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes
Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop
Countee Cullen, Copper Sun
A. A. Milne, Now We Are Six, illustrations by E. H. Shepard
Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey
Ernest Hemingway, Men Without Women (collection of short stories)
William Faulkner, Mosquitoes
Agatha Christie, The Big Four
Edith Wharton, Twilight Sleep
Herbert Asbury, The Gangs of New York (the original 1927 publication)
Franklin W. Dixon (pseudonym), The Tower Treasure (the first Hardy Boys book)
Hermann Hesse, Der Steppenwolf (in the original German)
Franz Kafka, Amerika (in the original German)
Marcel Proust, Le Temps retrouvé (the final installment of In Search of Lost Time, in the original French)
“These are just a handful of the thousands of books entering the public domain in 2023. There is a lot to celebrate: a modernist masterpiece, poetry from the Harlem Renaissance, children’s verses featuring Winnie-the-Pooh and other characters, and early works from Hemingway and Faulkner. Copyright will also expire over Arthur Conan Doyle’s final Sherlock Holmes stories—you can read more about copyright over characters and the Doyle estate’s attempts to artificially extend rights over Holmes and Dr. Watson here.”
And a few movies you can show anytime, any place:
Metropolis (directed by Fritz Lang)
The Jazz Singer (the first feature-length film with synchronized dialogue; directed by Alan Crosland)
Wings (winner of the first Academy Award for outstanding picture; directed by William A. Wellman)
Sunrise (directed by F.W. Murnau)
The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (Alfred Hitchcock’s first thriller)
The King of Kings (directed by Cecil B. DeMille)
London After Midnight (now a lost film; directed by Tod Browning)
The Way of All Flesh (now a lost film; directed by Victor Fleming)
7th Heaven (inspired the ending of the 2016 film La La Land; directed by Frank Borzage)
The Kid Brother (starring Harold Lloyd; directed by Ted Wilde)
The Battle of the Century (starring the comedy duo Laurel and Hardy; directed by Clyde Bruckman)
Upstream (directed by John Ford)
“1927 marked the beginning of the end of the silent film era, with the release of the first full-length feature with synchronized dialogue and sound. Here are the first words spoken in a feature film from The Jazz Singer: “Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain’t heard nothing yet.” Read about the transition from the silent film to the “talkie” era, and the quest to preserve some of the remarkable silent films on this list, here. Please note that while the original footage from these films will be in the public domain, newly added material such as musical accompaniment might still be copyrighted. If a film has been restored or reconstructed, only original and creative additions are eligible for copyright; if a restoration faithfully mimics the preexisting film, it does not contain newly copyrightable material.”
Celebrate your freedom today and enjoy using some of the newly-available materials available to you!
That’s right: every week we are going to celebrate some small holiday! We want you to join us in celebrating every week – because really, everyone needs a little more happiness in their lives.
Join us in celebrating the holiday just yourself, and take some small quiet time to enjoy it. Or, take our book and program ideas, and celebrate in a larger way in your library. Take a small, goofy opportunity to have a little more fun today! (We celebrate you in doing this!)
Today is National Chocolate Covered Cherry Day. These can be pretty polarizing: some people love them and some really do not. I grew up with a mom who loved them, especially at the holiday season. I never mind a little more chocolate in my day, but don’t go out of my way for them. But, am I going to eat one today? You bet! (I’ll share the box with other library people, because I’m definitely not finishing an entire box.)
Here are a few book ideas, for you or for your library:
How could you celebrate this day in your library? A few ideas:
Display of books on chocolate, candy, or cherries
Cherry trees are not only sources of fruit, their blossoms are beautiful and fragrant. Break out the paper and colored pencils, and have patrons draw trees and flowers – and create the most beautiful sets of colors and images they can imagine.
Set up a smelling event. Have a bunch of different smelling items, numbered. Let patrons take a sniff of each of them, and make notes about their guesses of the item. People with the most good guesses win!
The main thing today: just take a few minutes to enjoy yourself and to have a happy minute. We are here for you, and your year-long celebrations!
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