Category Archives: Academic

Academic, General, Public, School Media Specialist, Special

State Library Update: 12/22/15

MDELogoAttend an Upcoming Tax Resources for Libraries Webinar
The 2016 tax season is coming up quickly! To help libraries serve their communities during the tax season, State Library Services and the Minnesota Department of Revenue invite you to attend the Resources for Libraries webinar on Thursday, January 14, 2016 from 10-11 a.m.

The webinar will cover:
– Minnesota Department of Revenue updates
– Common Minnesota credits
– Important tax dates
– Identity theft
– Free tax preparation sites
– Helpful resources
– Q&A

Please join the WebEx meeting online and call in at 1-888-742-5095 (toll-free) or 1-619-377-3319 using meeting number 594 801 277. The webinar will be recorded. Please contact Emily Kissane (651-582-8805) with questions or to request the recording link.

Minnesota Public Library Report Update
Thank you to everyone who completed our data element questionnaire. Your feedback informs State Library Services about what information is useful and not a burden to collect for the annual Public Library Report.

Seventy-one public library directors, survey filers and other stakeholders responded. As a result of that feedback, the 2015 survey will add questions about library boards and summer reading programs. Public use indicators for duration of wireless sessions and number of full text retrievals from databases will not be included this year. Libraries will report branch daily hours by number of hours rather than opening and closing times.

The 2015 survey opens in early February. Instructions and documentation will be updated to include all the changes for this year, including definitions for electronic resources. If you did not have the opportunity to complete the questionnaire or have questions or concerns about the Public Library Report, please contact Joe Manion (651-582-8640).

Calling All Kid Filmmakers!
Know some imaginative kids? The 90-Second Newbery Film Festival is an annual video contest in which kid filmmakers make movies that creatively tell the entire stories of Newbery-winning books in ninety seconds or less. Making the film is a fun, creative and multi-faceted educational exercise. Kids cooperatively write, storyboard, produce, direct, costume, act, frame and edit their films.

Public librarians, school librarians, parents, teachers, and scout leaders are encouraged to work with their kids to make movies. The deadline to submit films for the 2015-2016 film festival is January 10, 2016. Inspiration and more information can be found on the 90-Second Newbery website. The second annual Minnesota screening of the best local entries is on Saturday, February 27, 2016, from 3:00-4:30 pm at Hennepin County Library – Minneapolis Central. Make your free reservation here. Co-hosts of the event will be James Kennedy (90-Second Newbery founder and middle grade author of The Order of Odd-Fish) and Kelly Barnhill (Minneapolis author of The Witch’s Boy). Please download and print a promotional poster to help spread the word about this popular event. For more details, please contact Jen Verbrugge (651-582-8356).

Save the Date—Libraries Serving Youth Meetup
The Meetup is an annual opportunity for school librarians and public librarians to meet, network and share ideas. We invite you to join us at MDE on Saturday, April 16, 2016 from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. to learn about serving diverse audiences from author/librarian Cathy Camper and get creative ideas from colleagues. Registration opens February 16, 2016. Stay tuned to the State Library Services website and this listserv for more information.

Upcoming Minnesota Literacy Council AmeriCorps Opportunities
The Minnesota Literacy Council (MLC) is recruiting organizational partners for the Summer Reads VISTA program. If your library offers summer learning for children entering grades K-4 and you’d like to benefit from highly-skilled tutors, check the MLC website for more details. For questions, please contact Meghan Paul-Cook (651-251-9069).

MLC has a second VISTA program, Literacy VISTA, which provides full-time, year-round VISTA members to work behind the scenes on creating, expanding or improving literacy-focused programming for children, youth, adults or families. For more info, visit the website, attend an information session (attendance required prior to applying) and contact Ellen Bergstrom (651-251-9151). Organizations may host both a Literacy VISTA and Summer Reads VISTA.

We wish you a happy and safe holiday season!

Academic, General, Public, School Media Specialist, Special

Notable Dates for your Noggin: January 2016

Calendar BannerEach month we’ll bring you a compiled list of fun national holidays, birthdays of authors, and publication dates of favorite books.  You can use these for your own personal use or for some library inspiration!

January is National Thank You Month and Weight Loss Awareness month! How long did your resolutions last?

Other things to celebrate in January. . .

January
1  Kwanzaa ends
 JD Salinger’s Birthday (1919)
 Frankenstein (Mary Shelley) published in 1818
2  National Science Fiction Day
3  JRR Tolkien’s birthday (1892)
8  Argyle Day
 Bubble Bath Day
12  Jack London’s birthday (1876)
18  A.A. Milne’s birthday (1882)
19  Edgar Allan Poe’s birthday (1809)
23  National Handwriting Day
25  National Opposite Day
27  Lewis Carroll’s birthday (1832)
 Chocolate Cake Day
28  Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen) published in 1813
29  Puzzle Day

Did we miss anything?  Let us know if we did!

For our calendar of library events, including conferences and library days, check out our Events/Initiatives page.

And for more Notable Dates for Your Noggin, check out our Notable Dates page.

Academic, General, Public, School Media Specialist, Special

Book crafts for the 12 days of Christmas

... happy holidays ...!!!Furiously counting down the days until Christmas? No need for more pressure? Please remember that there are 12 days of Christmas and that there will be some down time after the magical day of December 25th!

A perfect time to get your bookish crafts on! Our friends at Book Riot always have interesting ideas. Take a peek!

Feeling conflicted about using books to do crafts? Not a problem….for absolution, read this!

Image credit: http://tinyurl.com/opl8wqz,
licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Academic, General, Public, School Media Specialist

A great big cloud catalog for the greater good of all?

photo-1432139523732-e9d8af332501Prepare yourself for very big picture thinking on this post. Not a fast read (10 pages), but a mind blowing one. I have re-read it twice and it continues to get my pulse racing!

Have you ever noticed that if the average reader searches Google for a popular book title, that in the first two pages of search results (the only ones they care about), no public library shows up. Think about it,  public libraries are the single largest supplier of books, bigger than  Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Walmart, Costco or local bookstores.  And think about it, libraries don’t show up as an option, much less the best option for getting books at the best price. Why?

A few facts to ponder as provided by Steve Coffman, Information Today….

  • Goodreads ranks 67th among most visited U.S. websites, with 21.4 million unique monthly U.S. visitors, and 47.6 million form the world as a whole
  • OCLC’s Worldcat, our current largest collective catalog and the closest thing we have to Goodreads, ranks 3,748 of all websites in the U.S. and attracted 487,884 visitors in April of 2015
  • According to the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), collectively, U.S. public libraries had 170,911,488 registered members in 2012 (most recent available data). This accounts for more than half the total U.S. population, and almost six times the number of Goodreads members. So, why don’t libraries show up in search results?
  • More than 9,000 public libraries are diligently paying for and maintaining  individual catalogs at considerable expense. And, these catalogs are embedded in library automation systems that are isolated from web search engines. Everyone is in their silo, thinking their users have unique needs that only they can serve. Is this true? Can public libraries continue to operate this way, forever scrambling to prove themselves in order to get funding to keep the doors open?
  • Coffman recently wrote an astonishing  piece stating the obvious solution to this problem. “Ditch those 9,000 old, outmoded library catalogs and funnel all of our readers through one great catalog built on the web.” Although I know this solution could be met with scorn and bloodcurdling screams of  outrage, it is worth thinking about. What if?
  • In short, if libraries banded together to form a “Cloud Catalog”, “it could be the one source readers would go to  first when they want to find a book, regardless of who has it, what its format is, or whether it is in-print, out-of-print, or not yet published.”
  • There are details in Coffman’s post, lots of details….kudos to him, I bow to his brilliance in taking this subject on! One of the many details is a claim that none of the records in the Cloud Catalog would be MARC records! More blasphemy you say?

Please put your resistance aside and read the full article. If I was still in grad school, I would crank up the popcorn popper, open my dorm door, lure everyone in, and have a good conversation about this idea. Even capturing a small number of high points here gets my pulse racing! This would be a big move on the part of libraries, a “blindside” move according to producer standards of Survivor Island. That’s just it, libraries are barely surviving, and simply cannot continue as they are. We need solutions to this problem of visibility. Read the full piece, invite other library staff to do the same. Let me know when and where you want to hash this out, I’ll bring the popcorn!

Image credit: https://unsplash.com/ (Alex Munsell), licensed under CC0 1.0