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!

George Crosby Manitou park was established in 1955. https://www.dnr.state.mn.us/state_par…

The campsites here need to be hiked to, either from the Superior Hiking Trail or after leaving your car in the parking lot. Celebrate the wonderful isolation of this park with a book about a character who experiences some solitude.

Well, it looks like almost all of our members are closed for now!

So this is an exciting time in good library service!! We want to give you as much support as possible to keep providing service to your community members.

CMLE will be open (working at home!) and providing information each day during this time. We will have our regular schedule of articles, social media, and our weekly newsletter for you. Our podcasts are already recorded and scheduled for several weeks in advance, so you have those to enjoy yourselves, and to share with your community.

If you need help, or have questions – check in with us any time! We are here to help our members.

And we are proud members of the wider library community! So let’s keep working together to share information and ideas, and keep the flow of information moving for everyone’s community members.

We anticipate many of you will still be working online, and we have some ideas collected with ideas and resources you can share. Check “Library Life Online” and we will be updating this daily, sometimes hourly, with new stuff for you.

Some of this will be information on working at home, and on things you can do as a library to keep providing services online. We are so much more than in-person services, and this is a great opportunity to show that!

And to help libraries serving kids, especially in schools, we have set up a collection of pages: What are We Doing Today? We will create a new page each day, with activities to do, videos to watch, online tours of museums and zoos, and other material. This is aimed at kids who are at home.

Especially for library people who have kids in your community – we want to streamline the work you have to do to provide good information. Just link to our What Are We Doing Today? page, and the new day’s activities and material will be there.

Go ahead and link to all of this! Share it on your social media! Tell parents about it!

Do you have other resources to share? Tell us!

Do you have specific needs for information to share? We will help!

This is a tough time for everyone, as we all try to find the best way to do our usual work. CMLE is here to help you with sharing information, and providing online services. We are all part of the library community, and it’s good to work together!

So, things are a little strange right now. The whole worldwide pandemic issue is throwing many of us off our regular routines. There is a lot of confusion, as everyone works to figure out the best way to handle an evolving difficult situation.

But one thing is pretty clear: we all need to do what we can to NOT get sick right now. And that means we need to do some social isolation when possible. Cancelling public programs, moving computers around, working at home when you can, providing more resources online: all of this will help our community members to keep themselves, and us, safer.

Things are changing daily, even hourly. We don’t necessarily know what the best strategies will be, though everyone is doing their best right now. And CMLE is here to provide help to our library members.

We are assembling a list of materials that you can use in case you are, or will be working at home. Look on our front page menu; this is called Library Life Online, and you can find it on the top left of the page.

We will have material about telecommuting, and also material you can use to share with your patrons – especially your younger patrons. This webpage will be on our top menu, and you can access it any time. It is a work in progress, and we will continue added to it over the next few weeks.

Library people can do a lot of work online to fulfill our primary mission: to serve our community members. It doesn’t matter whether or not your building is open, or if you have cancelled public programs, or taken other steps to encourage distancing: there is work you can do to help your patrons.

Whether or not your library ends up closing, it is good to be thinking ahead about serving your community in a more flexible format! The world is moving online – and we want to provide effective service there.

CMLE members: if you have specific questions, and want to talk about your own situation of providing online instruction, programs, and materials – email me any time at mary@cmle.org. I’ll get back to everyone as soon as I can, and work with your individual situation.

Things are going to be strange for a while; but we are in the information business, and we have good work we can do together!

We have all kinds of educational images in the VR kits we have to loan out to our members. And to help everyone keep looking informed about the assorted uses of VR and AR in all sorts of areas, we keep sharing information with you!

I really like to read books and watch documentaries about the process of climbing Mt. Everest. It’s a huge challenge, and it’s interesting to see how people are doing it.

But I would never want to do this – it’s way too hard, way too much work, and way too expensive. So an opportunity to learn about the trip in virtual reality would be very cool!

Check out the article excerpt below, and you can click here to get the entire thing.

Virtual reality Everest VR docuseries takes you up the world’s tallest mountain at home

“Climbing the tallest mountain in the world is not something any of us are likely to accomplish in our lifetime.

Despite this, summiting Mount Everest isn’t the exclusive experience it used to be. Over 4,000 people have made it to the top since Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary first accomplished the feat in 1953.

Not all expeditions end in success and, in April 2017, climber Ueli Steck attempted to reach the summit without the help of bottled oxygen. He died on the West Ridge of the mountain at the ripe old age of 40.

Steck’s friend, a mountain guide called Sherpa Tenji, decided to finish the journey as a way to honour him. Renowned cameraman Jonathan Griffith joined the party and used the expedition to create Everest VR: Journey to the Top of the World, a docuseries shot specifically for virtual reality headsets.

‘Ueli mentored Sherpa Tenji from a very young age,’ Griffith explained. ‘He really took him under his wing. They were on this project to do it together, so it felt fitting to get Tenji to try and finish up his mentor’s climb in his stead.’

The series consists of three episodes and was made with the assistance of Oculus, the Facebook-owned virtual reality (VR) company that’s been working to make VR mainstream for the last several years.”

Thank you for joining us on Reading With Libraries! We are so glad you are here to join our book group podcast!

You can find our full show notes page here. We give you links to all the beverages we enjoyed, and the books we share here.

We started this podcast to provide useful information for library people doing Reader’s Advisory work. There are so many books out there that it’s tough to be an expert on all of them. So we pick a new genre each week to chat about and hopefully provide you with some insight into what may be an unfamiliar genre!

This week we’re talking about a very popular genre: chick lit! Thank you to our returning Guest Host Ariel for coming to share books with us!