We want to put together a collection of videos. And not just any videos. We want to share information about libraries!

You are probably home anyway, so this is a great time to grab your phone and make a quick video.

And what are you going to say?

We want you to do an elevator pitch for libraries!

Spend 30 to 60 seconds, and tell us why you love libraries. Or something great about libraries. Or your very best story about your own library.

We just want you to quickly distill something great about libraries, and tell us about it!

Here are a few resources you can check out to get other ideas about elevator pitches. But the main idea is easy: in a concise way, make your point. And here that point is “Here is something great about libraries!”

• Elevator Pitch on Wikipedia
• How to Give an Elevator Pitch (With Examples)

We will put these video onto our YouTube page, all collected together. Then all library people can point to this collection of videos, to share a bunch of viewpoints about how great libraries are for their communities!

• Need to tell a stakeholder how valuable your library is?
• Need to convince a funder to keep funding your work?
• Need to show your patrons about all your great stuff?

We want you to use this (future!) archive of videos for all of these uses!

You guys are in libraries. You work there every day. You know how wonderful and valuable they can be.

And now we want you to tell other people!

No need to make these look fancy – though of course if you want to, that’s fine too. We aren’t going to edit them. (Though, we will watch them, to be sure nothing gets posted that is not about libraries.)

You can share your videos with us at our administrative email: admin@cmle.org. Here are some directions on sharing videos using Google Drive. (We are new at videos! So have some patience while we get these things organized on our end.)

While we are all staying healthy/staying home, we will be sharing crafts appropriate to families working to pass the time. And of course, everything is appropriate for those of us who are young at heart!

When everyone is at home, you probably get more empty toilet paper rolls. And you can recycle them – or use them to make stuff. Today, we are going to use them to make bugs!

You can find all the instructions on this blog, right here. There are instructions for making all kinds of different bugs! Here are the materials you can use. And if you don’t have everything on this list, that’s fine. We are just going to have fun with bugs!

• toilet paper rolls
• craft paints
• glue
• split pins (optional)
• black liner
• brush
• scissors
• color papers (red, blue, green and more)
• googly eyes
• circle puncher

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!

Check out our show notes page here. We give you links to all the books we shared in this episode.

Banning State Park was established in 1963. “September 1, 1894, the great Hinckley forest fire swept through the area.” This was an enormous disaster for the area, and the state of Minnesota. Read a book about a disaster of any sort, especially if there is a happy ending. You can find more books on this subject on our reading group podcast Reading With Libraries, episode 405: Natural Disasters.

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!

We know you guys are all working hard hard right now. And we are here to support you!

We are going to suspend the VR kit loans for the rest of this school year. We have notified the schools involved, but wanted to let anyone who might be waiting to see if you could borrow one. But we are looking forward to loaning them back out again to schools this fall!

We are also going to suspend our mini-grant and scholarship applications for the rest of this school year. No more applications will be accepted or funded.

If you have already applied, you are fine – we will honor that commitment. If you are not going to be able to fulfill your mini-grant this year, please let us know. We will work with you to move your funding to next school year.

If you have not submitted your receipts and report, please just hang onto them. Our office building is closed, so receiving mail will be a problem for us right now. And we would only be able to issue checks in extenuating circumstances, until the schools are open again. Your money is yours – no problem with that; but we are pausing operations along with everyone else for the moment.

Whew! It is this kind of thing that makes us all realize the great things we took for granted just a couple of weeks ago!

But, CMLE is always here for you. We want to help support your library work – whether you are in-person or working online. If you have not checked out our list of resources, it’s right here!

Stay home. Stay healthy. And let us know if we can do anything to help your library! You can always reach out to us at admin@cmle.org. We’re here for you.