The ACRL/ULS Academic Outreach Committee offers a series of Online Roundtable Discussions on topics related to academic outreach endeavors. You are invited to join in the next one!
June 2020 topic: Remote Outreach and Engagement
This month’s discussion will focus on Remote Outreach and Engagement. Come prepared to talk about what you’re doing, share ideas, successes, and lessons learned. Join us for a lively discussion and leave with great ideas to bring back to your library!
Each discussion will be hosted on Zoom, will last one hour, and will be run by a facilitator (like a face-to-face roundtable discussion).
Sign up for one of the following dates and times:
Tuesday, June 2 at 11am CST Register Wednesday, June 3 at 3pm CST Register Thursday, June 4 at 11am CST Register
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!
Lake Bronson was yet another park established in 1937. This park has the largest observation/water tower across Minnesota state parks! So let’s celebrate that by reading a book about a tower, or a high place.
We give you links to each of these books on our show notes page, taking you to Amazon.com. If you click on any of them, and buy anything at all – including a nice book – Amazon will send us a small percent of the profits they made on these sales. Thank you for supporting CMLE!
Thanks for joining us! We’ll be back next week with a look at the next park and the next book prompt!
U.S. flags stand in front of fallen service members graves on Memorial Day at Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington Va, May 28, 2012. DoD photo by Erin A. Kirk-Cuomo (Released)
(Quick Update: This is a copy of the same article I wrote last year. Information Literacy means understanding all kinds of information/ideas/experiences on topics. I hold out this experience as something incredibly common – but not much discussed; it’s my best contribution to the importance of Memorial Day, and building better ideas around it. I cried a little writing this, and I cried a little rereading it. I still feel a very strong hatred for chicken-hawk politicians – and that will never change. I hope you feel it too. I’ve been making an effort to turn on the light inside my car at night – it’s kind of scary. Sometimes Information Literacy is painful or scary or hard; but it’s still valuable to reach outside our usual ideas and thoughts. That search for understand is the true value of libraries, and foundation of our priceless freedom to share information.)
War changed my life, before I was ever born.
I am, of course, not alone in this – tens millions of people across the planet are caught up in wars not of their making, not of their choosing, not of their fighting. We are bystanders to it all, and yet our lives are forever altered.
And we are the forgotten witnesses to what war really means.
The impact of war goes well beyond chickenhawk politicians braying for war – and the money and attention and votes it brings to them. It goes beyond a entrenched military industrial complex that funnels billions of dollars to a few big corporations. It goes beyond even the flag-covered coffins of soldiers returned home, photos of which were banned from being shown for many years and which still tend to be hidden from view.
Today is Memorial Day.
It’s the day set aside to remember the soldiers who died serving in the military. It gives everyone an opportunity to take a moment to give a much-deserved thank you and remembrance of the tens of thousands of American soldiers who have died in service to their country. This is indeed the best way to commemorate the day.
(Don’t save your thanks to vets for just Veteran’s Day either. Give to the USO, and other organizations, and show tangible thanks and support!)
But this day also makes me furious. All I see is the enormous waste – of life, of potential, of money, of every possibility that could have happened and didn’t. Because someone, somewhere – maybe with great information and with the best of intentions, but probably not (I’ve read too much history to not be cynical on this) – decided it was okay to ruin lives.
Dead is easy. Dead is done. Everyone has their own thoughts on death; but in this context – it’s over. 58,202 American soldiers died in Vietnam. Their stories, their possibilities, the good things they could have contributed to society – it’s over. Their families and friends are allowed to mourn them, and try to get on with their lives as well as they can. We will never replace the empty spots they should have been there to fill. The contributions are gone forever.
But most people in wars don’t die. They go on. And their war follows them forever. And it connects to everyone around them. And it never lets go. And life for everyone around them is changed forever.
My dad was like a lot of rural kids growing up on a farm: a lot of hard work, no extra money, not a lot of opportunity floating around for anyone. And my grandmother was like a lot of immigrant moms: she wanted better things for her son. She wanted him to go to college, to get an education, and to have a good life. So she helped to push him there, and he was able to go to college. It took money that nobody had; so he sold his cows, he worked assorted jobs, and he joined ROTC. He graduated, got married to my mom, and four months later went to war in Vietnam.
He came home with a lot of medals for all kinds of things, and with scars physical and mental. He doesn’t talk a lot about it. When we were kids, he would tell us about how much he liked chocolate chip cookies in MREs, and would trade hand grenades for them. It was just enough information to let us know things were scary, but not so much that we would be too scared. We saw pictures of him standing at an orphanage, with kids swimming in a bomb crater filled with water. He told us about forging signatures (Donald Duck, I believe) to get supplies there. He showed us pictures of four of his South Vietnamese colleagues visiting us in Colorado in 1969. They got to hold his baby (me!), and they got to have the unusual experience of snowball fights high in the Rocky Mountains. When we asked what happened next, he just briefly said “They are probably all dead,” and changed the subject.
Everyone is making plans for the future in your own library. We are sharing an article excerpt here for you to use as you consider your own plans. And you can get this entire article right here.
“Even before librarians closed their doors against the pandemic, they started moving fast to keep their work going. They began shifting regular programming online; distributing stockpiles of mobile technology to the digitally needy; strengthening partnerships with schools and food donation sites; activating their maker-technology to produce PPE; helping prepare the homeless population with alternatives for shelter; and more. I wrote about libraries’ novel response to the novel coronavirus here.
The ideas keep coming. Pick-up and drop-off services are emerging. The Alexandria, Ohio, public library offers curbside pick-ups. The Hillsborough County library in Florida opened a drive-through pickup for reemployment-assistance applications. People can also drop them off when completed, and the library will mail them.
In Arlington, Virginia, the public library has already published several online issues of Quaranzine, a community-sourced collection of artwork, poetry, photos, and stories about life during the pandemic.
The Hartford Public Library in Connecticut has moved their immigrant services online, including providing legal help to complete citizenship applications and prepare for citizenship interviews.
Serendipitous moments spur other ideas. When researching the Raymond M. Blasco Memorial Library’s history for the upcoming annual report, Blane Dessy, the new director of the Erie, Pennsylvania, library, came across the annual report from 1918, documenting that the library had shuttered before—during the influenza pandemic. It inspired Dessy to begin working on an Erie County COVID-19 print and digital archive for future reference. “Here we are again,” he wrote me in an email, “and it strikes me that this pandemic will be an interesting story in the history of libraries in the United States.”
This week we are talking about running! Last week we talked about books about pandemics and other scary things. This week we are going to look at another topic that focuses on health. If you want to do some running of your own – great! And if reading about running can help you work on some healthy behaviors, that’s great too!
Our Guest Host is Kate Wallace, from Marketing and Communications at the St Cloud Technical and Community College. She is also an avid runner, and has visited every state park in Minnesota!
When you run, and when you are done, you need to think about rehydrating. This week our beverages will help us to be well hydrated, as well as giving us the energy and endurance to make it through this discussion.
Partnering with libraries for visioning, advocating, and educating
