We are big fans of the Teen Lit Con!

The purpose of this day is to celebrate teen literature, promote reading and writing, and to create a community of readers by connecting teens and authors.

There is no registration required, and there is no fee to attend. This year it is April 25, 2020, from 10am-4pm, at Henry Sibley High School. The website is here.

There are four headline authors:

• Michael Bennett, author of Things That Make White People Uncomfortable (Adapted for Young Adults)
• Karen McManus, author of One of Us Is Next: The Sequel to One of Us Is Lying
• Randy Ribay, author of Patron Saint of Nothing
• Ibi Zoboi, author of Black Enough: Stories of Being Young & Black in America

CMLE is sponsoring a bus to take high school students to the Teen Lit Con. Our school library representative to the CMLE board, Bethany Kaufmann, from Rogers High School is taking students and can coordinate with you if you can get your students there. If you think this might something useful at your school, get in touch with me at mary @ cmle . org and let’s see if we can get this organized.

This is another author event at St. Benedict’s College. We are meeting up there, and can sit together for this author presentation.

If you have not attended one of these lectures, they are always interesting – with new ideas and people talking about their interesting books.

You can always find our events in our weekly newsletter, or sign up on our Meetup member group page: Relaxed Readers.

The Literary Arts Institute of the College of Saint Benedict introduces the first McNeely Creative Writer in Residence:

Susan Steinberg 2020 McNeely Creative Writer in Residence

Public Reading: March 10, 2020 Upper Gorecki: 7:00 PM

Susan Steinberg’s first novel Machine will be published by Graywolf in August 2019. She is also author of the story collections Spectacle (Graywolf), Hydroplane (FC2), and The End of Free Love (FC2).

Susan Steinberg is Professor and Chair of English at the University of San Francisco and is also currently the Bedell Distinguished Visiting Professor in the graduate Creative Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa.

She is the recipient of a United States Artists Fellowship, the Pushcart Prize and a National Magazine Award. Her stories and essays have appeared in McSweeney’s, The Rumpus, Conjunctions, The Gettysburg Review, American Short Fiction, Boulevard, Quarterly West, Denver Quarterly, The Massachusetts Review, and other journals and magazines.

Susan Steinberg will be in residency on our campuses from March 9th through April 3rd, 2020.

It’s always good to go visit our members! Everyone is doing things that are interesting, and things that other libraries will want to learn about or try for themselves. (Yes, I’m feeling a little braggy here, but CMLE has the best members!)

This was a quick visit to the library at North Junior High School. Have we been to visit your library yet? Send us an email at admin @ cmle . org, and let’s set up a date that works for your schedule! (We like to come and oooh and aaah over your stuff!)

This is probably not in every library – but I was so delighted to see it in this library! These are the cubes members can print out and assemble themselves, and use with the VR headsets in the kits we are loaning out to members! One of the things everyone gets with the loan is free access to all the lessons (over 700 of them!); and in some of them students can use augmented reality to hold images in their hands with these cubes. Would your students like to hold atoms in chemistry class? Statues in art class? It’s all there, for you!

I admit to being overly happy at reading about communication information! And if you add that in with some good books students can enjoy by grade? Well, this set of signs is making me very happy to enjoy!

One thing you immediately notice about this library is how nicely it is arranged! Sorry about my poor photography, but you can see how bright and open it feels, and how nicely the shelves are organized. Using shelves that staff can see over lets students get help when needed. And using the smaller sized shelves is appropriate for students who are not quite fully grown yet.

Check these out!! I love to see comics and graphic novels in libraries! Not every student will come to you, ready to enjoy 600 page novels. Trying to force people into a book that is not right for them is contrary to every principle of library science. They might start with these materials, and move into longer novels – or not. Either is fine, so we need to be ready to serve our community members!

Aaaaahhhhh – look at another shot of the lovely, airy feeling in this library! The ceiling is two stories over the floor, so it feels so nice and open. And when you add in the skylights, the whole place feels like somewhere you would choose to enjoy passing time.

While libraries are always more than “just” books – of course, books are kind of our best-known product! And it’s always useful to be able to do some Reader’s Advisory with our community members. Look at the helpful genre descriptions here! It’s so useful for students, and adults, to get a sense of the range of books available.

We are very into this idea – and even have a podcast all about it! Check out Reading with Libraries, where we talk about new genres and books each week! You can subscribe in your favorite podcast app, or stream it on our website. And we are ALWAYS looking for more people to come be part of our community, and to chat with us about books they like! It’s fun, it’s easy, and you would really help me out if you would send me an email at mary @ cmle . org, and tell me a genre you like (no matter how broad or obscure!), and give me a couple of potential dates you can come over.

Hello! Thank you for joining us on Reading With Libraries! We’re so glad you could be here to enjoy our book group podcast.

You can find our full show notes here, with links to all the beverages we enjoyed and to the books we discussed.

We are the Central Minnesota Libraries Exchange, and we support libraries of all types: schools, publics, academics, and special libraries and archives. 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 discussing YA books that help teen boys to develop a love of reading. We’ll share book titles and ideas to encourage them to form strong reading habits while still in school. 

We are so pleased to welcome back a Guest Host with firsthand experience with this issue – Bethany Kauffman, media specialist from Rogers High School!

No matter what kind of library you are in, your community members are probably looking around for good information about the coronavirus/covid-19 virus. As people in the information profession, we want to help ensure our community members have the best quality information, especially in such an ever-shifting circumstance.

We are sharing some material on this topic, from EveryLibrary. We have an excerpt below, and you can get all the information on their website.

“Dealing with COVID-19, the disease caused by the Coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) raises many questions for librarians. Since being designated as essential disaster services, libraries have focused on the roles that we can serve during emergencies. Most of the attention, has gone to natural, weather, and human disasters as opposed to widespread disease outbreaks but the National Library of Medicine has a great Coronavirus resource page available to librarians as well.

The biggest role libraries can play in a national response to the emerging COVID-19 threat is as information specialists.

Information Literacy as a Nonpharmaceutical Intervention

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) summary on COVID-19 is being updated constantly (get the website badge), and the National Library Of Medicine has this great page for resource tools for libraries. Of course, the overall message to citizens so far has remained the same. Don’t panic, and wash your hands.

It really is a pity that we wasted the efficacy of the “Keep Calm and…” posters because that would be a perfect image for libraries to post right now. With no current vaccine or approved medications, the best approach the CDC recommends at this time is a broad spectrum of what are called nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs). There are posters and other educational materials available on the CDC website.

NPIs for COVID-19 are quite similar to those for other viral diseases like the flu. On a personal level they include proper hand washing and maintaining social distancing. So when people talk about COVID-19 being similar to the flu, it is certainly true in terms of current best responses.

Comparisons between COVID-19 and the flu have gone beyond hand washing and entered the zone of conspiracy theories and misinformation. NewsGuard has compiled a list of sources that have advanced inaccurate information. For example, it has been proposed on some websites that the Coronavirus is a hoax, nothing more than the common cold or flu being elevated for political purposes. Other sides suggest cures or preventative measures that have no medical support or that misinterpret studies. These conspiracy theories need a NPI as well. One that libraries are uniquely poised to support.

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What Libraries Can Do:

• Plan now for when COVID-19 becomes a local issue: In the United States, response to public health emergencies is localized. Reach out to your county public health department to see if there is anything you can do to support their efforts.  
• Gather information resources from trusted and accurate sources like Medline Plus that are easily understood by patrons. Resources like the CDC summary page for COVID-19 are great, but require a deeper level of understanding and are not written for the general public. The comic-style resources made available by Weiman Kow at comicsforgood.com can also be effective for sharing.
• Spread awareness of disinformation using neutral sources like NewsGuard that are gathering and debunking myths. Be very cautious of the risks of disinformation from open sources like Facebook or from single issue resources like subreddits that promote confirmation bias. Also be cautious on the graphic design messages being unintentionally transmitted.
• Help patrons understand the medical terminology being used. Widespread has a specific and surprisingly low threshold in terms of epidemiology. When a doctor at CDC uses the word, it may mean something different from what the news reports or what the reader understands.
• Coordinate with community public health resources on local implementation of NPIs. Proper hand washing is the best defense at this time and is a good idea at all times. The National Library Of Medicine Coronavirus preparedness page has great policy and practices recommendations.”