At CMLE Headquarters, our mission is to serve our members. One of the biggest issues our members have talked about with us is the problem of being alone in their libraries, or feeling unconnected from the work other library people are doing.
We are on the job for you!
We have a variety of opportunities for all of us to gather in person to chat about libraries (or other topics – we are fascinating people after all!), and to visit libraries.
Our visits to member libraries will happen monthly; our social dinner gatherings happen approximately every other month. All of these events are flexible; if you need to leave early, we understand and will just be happy to see you!
These gatherings are a chance for all of us to chat about libraries, issues you are facing in your library, and to tell us about great success stories you experience. Being alone in your library, or being the only person who does what you do in your library, can seem rough. We want to give you lots of ways to connect with your community of library people here in CMLE!
We will be delighted to see you at any, or all, of these events no matter what; but if you know in advance that you can attend, please leave an RSVP below. Then we know to expect you! We will send you a reminder email before each event when you sign up below.
One of the primary ethical obligations for library people is to preserve the privacy of their patrons. This can be tough to do sometimes, and we can be leaking information in ways we have not even considered. To help us all provide quality service, the Library Information Technology Association, working with the Intellectual Freedom Committee, has put together some checklists for you to use in your own library.
Remember: even if you are alone in your library, you are part of the CMLE system, and part of the larger profession of library and information science! We are all working together to provide great service to all our communities!
Do you do reference work or user services? Would you like to chat with other people who do this too?? RUSA is your answer! We are passing on some information about a RUSA webinar where you can find out more about them, and see how they can help you.
“Are you in reference or user services? At RUSA, we do what you do. See how you can get involved in the Reference and User Services Association by attending our RUSA 101 webinar. Here are the details: Continue reading Learn about RUSA at this webinar!→
“We can learn much about how a historical period viewed the abilities of its children by studying its children’s literature. Occupying a space somewhere between the purely didactic and the nonsensical, most children’s books published in the past few hundred years have attempted to find a line between the two poles, seeking a balance between entertainment and instruction. However, that line seems to move closer to one pole or another depending on the prevailing cultural sentiments of the time. And the very fact that children’s books were hardly published at all before the early 18th century tells us a lot about when and how modern ideas of childhood as a separate category of existence began….
Where the boundaries for kids’ literature had once been narrowly fixed by Latin grammar books and Pilgrim’s Progress, by the end of the 19th century, the influence of science fiction like Jules Verne’s, and of popular supernatural tales and poems, prepared the ground for comic books, YA dystopias, magician fiction, and dozens of other children’s literature genres we now take for granted, or—in increasingly large numbers—we buy to read for ourselves. Enter the Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature here, where you can browse several categories, search for subjects, authors, titles, etc, see full-screen, zoomable images of book covers, download XML versions, and read all of the over 6,000 books in the collection with comfortable reader views. Find more classics in our collection, 800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kindle & Other Devices.”
