A video from Angela Hursh.

When you open your library back up (slowly! carefully!!), you can probably count on having some patrons who want to be miffed. (Yes, we’re having a global pandemic, and nobody was being punished by being asked to stay home to avoid dying of a virus. But, some people are not feeling the logic of it all!)

It’s always good to be prepared!

“Angela addresses a serious subject. As libraries reopen their physical buildings, library staff members are worried about dealing with patrons who are upset. Angela offers some tips for dealing with patrons who are having trouble accepting the new rules and regulations. She also has a special message for library managers-PLEASE WATCH! Do you have more tips to share with your fellow library staffers? Please add your suggestions in the comments. Also Kudos to Poudre River Public Library District. They have a fun and innovated curbside service for kids called Bag ‘O Books. Learn more here: https://read.poudrelibraries.org/cont…

What did you think of this episode? Are you struggling with marketing and promotion right now? Do you have a nominee for the Kudos segment? Drop a comment below! And subscribe to this series to get a new video tip for libraries each week! Thanks for watching.”

Welcome to a summer of good reading – and good state parks!

This season we are suggesting books you might enjoy for our Goodreads group: Armchair Travel to Minnesota State Parks. We give you a prompt connected to each state park, and you find a book to fulfill the challenge. You can use one of our suggestions, and you should feel free to read any book!

Red River Valley State Recreation Area was established in 2000. https://www.dnr.state.mn.us/state_par…

Celebrate the frequent question at any library: “I’m looking for a book with a red cover; do you know it?” by reading a book with a red cover!

You can find our show notes page here, with links to all six books we are sharing this week.

Join us in reading some new books this week!

Check out this webinar from NCompass! If you miss the live version, you can always go back and check the recording.

It’s not enough to do our standard “this is what we always do” services and materials – all libraries need to be constant working to reach out to all members of our communities, not just the ones we see every day.

You can go here to register.

“How often does your library make decisions about services offered without checking with library users first? Are library administrators or external agents making decisions on behalf of library patrons without understanding their needs? Are you puzzling over why some of your programs are poorly attended, or services under utilized? Do you sometimes feel like you are floundering in the dark, trying to make sense of patron behavior? Have you done usability testing, but need to go beyond that to learn even easier methods for assessing and improving library services?

In this session we will discuss ways to know your users better through some powerful UX techniques like: creating user personas, diagramming user journey maps, conducting focus groups and surveys, field studies, and card sorting. This session, conducted by a librarian at a university and a UX professional from the private sector, will include demonstrations showcasing both qualitative and quantitative UX methods. Attendees will leave with ready models to put to work in their library.

Presenters: Jennifer DeJonghe, Reference and Instruction Librarian, Metropolitan State University; Rich Harrison, User Experience Consultant, Horizontal.

NCompass Live is broadcast live on Wednesdays, from 10am – 11am Central Time. Convert to your time zone on the Official U.S. Time website or use the World Clock Time Zone Converter. In the Time Zone Converter, NCompass Live is broadcast from U.S.A – Nebraska – Lincoln.

The show is recorded for anyone who may want to watch it again or who cannot attend at the scheduled time. Registration is not required to view the archived recordings.

NCompass Live is presented online using the GoToWebinar online meeting service. GoToWebinar login instructions are sent to registered attendees after registration for a session has closed. The Registration End date is listed on each session page, but usually closes on the Monday night before the date of the session.

Please see the NLC Online Sessions webpage for detailed information about GoToWebinar, including system requirements, firewall permissions, and equipment requirements for computer speakers and microphones. “

Welcome to a summer of good reading – and good state parks!

We are the Central Minnesota Libraries Exchange, a multitype library system serving all types of libraries.

This season we are suggesting books you might enjoy for our Goodreads group: Armchair Travel to Minnesota State Parks. We give you a prompt connected to each state park, and you find a book to fulfill the challenge. You can use one of our suggestions, and you should feel free to read any book!

Moose Lake park was started in 1971. https://www.dnr.state.mn.us/state_par… This park has a lovely Agate and Geological Interpretive Center. Dig into this by reading a book about geology, rocks, or jewels.

You can find our show notes page here, with links to all the books we are sharing this week.

Join us in reading some new books this week!

If you buy any journals, you know how shockingly expensive they are. So check out this article excerpt about a service called Unsub. It might help your library to save a lot of money on useless subscriptions!

You can read the whole article here.

“Unsub is the game-changing data analysis service that is helping librarians forecast, explore, and optimize their alternatives to the Big Deal. Unsub (known as Unpaywall Journals until just this week) supports librarians in making independent assessments of the value of their journal subscriptions relative to price paid rather than relying upon publisher-provided data alone. Librarians breaking away from the Big Deal often credit Unsub as a critical component of their strategy. I am grateful to Heather Piwowar and Jason Priem, co-founders of Our Research, a small nonprofit organization with an innocuous sounding name that is the provider of Unsub, for taking time to answer some questions for the benefit of the readers of The Scholarly Kitchen. “

“What is Unsub? 

Unsub is a tool that helps librarians analyze and optimize their serials subscriptions; it’s like cost-per-use (CPU) analysis on steroids. Using Unsub, librarians can get better value for their shrinking subscription dollar — often by replacing expensive, leaky Big Deals with smaller, more custom collections of a-la-carte titles.

How’s it work? There are three stages:

1. Gather the data: Libraries (or consortia) upload their COUNTER reports; we take it from there. 

For each journal, we collect:

• Citation and authorship rates from researchers at the library’s institution, 
• costs of different modes of access (e.g., a-la-carte subscription, interlibrary loan (ILL) or document delivery fulfillment), and
• rates of open access and backfile fulfillment. 

This last category is where a lot of the value of the analysis comes from; we find that up to half of content requests can be fulfilled via open access, for free.

2. Analyze the data. We process all of this data into a customized forecasting model that predicts a given library’s costs and fulfillment rates for the next five years, for each journal. Libraries can customize all the model’s assumptions, reflecting different levels of risk tolerance and creating worst-case and best-case scenarios.

3. Act on the data. In most cases, the models demonstrate that the Big Deal delivers great coverage, but poor value. By relying on open access, and strategically subscribing to high-value titles, libraries can often deliver around 80% of the fulfillment at 20% of the cost. Armed with this data, librarians can a) negotiate with publishers more successfully and b) support decisions to cancel, should they decide to.”

You can read the rest of this article right here!