At CMLE, we want to provide material for continuing education for our members. We have a variety of strategies for this, including the material we and our Guest Bloggers provide here.
To add to this, we are beginning a Monthly Topic. Each month we will provide a broad topic that will be relevant to our members. Within that topic will be several different topics, and we will provide information in a variety of formats.
This will include monthly training programs offered in a variety of formats to make it accessible for members. Our plans are to offer monthly in-person sessions for members to have a chance to get together and talk about the topic, and the issues it raises in their libraries. We also plan to have this session (or a similar one) offered as a live webinar for members who want to attend but cannot leave their libraries, and to record that session so members can watch it later on their own schedules.Continue reading Introducing October's Monthly Topic: Hiring!→
Attention, book-loving CMLE members! (We hope that is most of you!)
You may have read our earlier post introducing CMLE’s two new book groups on Goodreads. One of our groups is aimed at professional development for librarians, and the books that we will be reading will hopefully be useful to you in your place of work. Our second book group is more about reading for fun, and the books we read will be a little more light-hearted!
Do you want to read with us, but need to borrow a copy of either book? CMLE has two copies of The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up and one copy of Curiosity Thrilled the Cat that are available to borrow!
Email Angie and let her know if you are interested. Looking forward to reading together!
As a library system, filled with library people, we like to read books. So let’s get together and read books and chat about them!
We have set up two monthly book groups on Goodreads, where we have a forum to discuss our books. If there is interest in holding in-person book group sessions at host locations, that would also be great; but we want it to be accessible to everyone, so we will always have an online discussion where we can all share in the reading. (If you want to have an in-person monthly meeting, either at CMLE Headquarters, or in another location – email Mary !)
We will have two copies of the paper book to share, if you want to borrow one for a few days. Email Angie to get on the borrowing list!
The first group will be have a professional theme; here we will read books that may be helpful to you at work. They may be specifically library-oriented, or may be books that would be relevant to the work we do in our libraries. We have a preliminary list of books that might be interesting to our members; and we encourage you to suggest books that we all might enjoy!
For our October book in this group, we will be reading “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up” by Marie Kondō. “Japanese cleaning consultant Marie Kondo takes tidying to a whole new level, promising that if you properly simplify and organize your home once, you’ll never have to do it again.” Can this help you at work?? We will have to read the book to find out how!
Below is a fairly long video (42 minutes) Kondo gave at Google. She, and her translator, work through her entire system of sorting and keeping objects in the house.
And here is a short video, with just music in the background, where Kondo helps a woman organize her bookshelf:
They may be aspirational, but the results look good!
Our other book group will be a fiction book group, with readings we do for fun. There may be a theme of “librarian as main character” through the books we read, but that will not be a requirement. As library people, we all hear too much of the comment “it must be so fun to sit around and read books at work all day;” and it’s amazingly frustrating!! But of course, most of us really do like to read books! So we can have this time to enjoy a book together each month.
In October, we will be reading “Curiosity Thrilled the Cat” by Sofie Kelly. “When librarian Kathleen Paulson moved to Mayville Heights, Minnesota, she had no idea that two strays would nuzzle their way into her life. Owen is a tabby with a catnip addiction and Hercules is a stocky tuxedo cat who shares Kathleen’s fondness for Barry Manilow. But beyond all the fur and purrs, there’s something more to these felines.”
This book does not come with videos, but we have a couple of other ones for you to enjoy:
Who wouldn’t want a job as Kitten Librarian?? (not technically a library; but still a great idea!)
And these important helpers in the Huron Library in London, Ontario are clearly making an important contribution!
Stacks the Library Cat has a pretty significant fan club at the New Castle library in Pennsylvania
Both of these books are available in paper, eBook, and audio formats; so pick a format that works for you! Content is the important part; flexibility of format is just a bonus.
At CMLE, we want to provide our members with information on all kinds of issues that they may encounter in their library workplaces. And we want to be sure we have a wide variety of voices here to pass on information, experiences (good and bad!), suggestions, tips, and just general information that others could find helpful. Everyone has a story to share, experience to pass on, and ideas to contribute to make us all stronger!
We are actively soliciting for members to share their stories with us! We want to get all our CMLE members to share with each other here on our blog.
What could you write about?
a program that was fantastic, everything went smoothly, and you think other libraries could adopt
a program that was a disaster from start to finish, and you have a cautionary tale to terrify other libraries (Halloween is coming up, after all)
a program that fell somewhere between these two extremes
a database your users really like
a new technology you tried
some collection development or cataloging strategies you have developed over the years, that could make things easier/faster/more efficient for other people
a problem you are facing, where you could really use some advice from other people who have also been there
your library’s garden
your library’s pet
your library’s pet rock
quick tips to make scheduling easier
the cutest thing that happened last week
the scariest think that happened last week
the marketing plan you just wrote
your special, patented, never-fail strategy for ensuring your printers never jam! (okay – if you have this one, we DEFINITELY want it!)
Are we worried about perfection in writing up these stories? Nope!
Are we looking only for people who are amazing, perfect writers? No way!
Are we available to brainstorm with you, help with writing, and do the formatting and such to get your work posted and shared with CMLE? You bet!!
You can contribute a paragraph, a page, or longer! Not all information to be shared needs the same amount of discussion, so things are flexible here for you.
In addition to being open to almost anything you guys want to share and discuss, we are putting out a call for some specific topics. CMLE will be offering Monthly Topic themes, with blog posts and training focused all in an area that should be helpful to our members. We really want to hear from you and to share your stories, ideas, suggestions, and whatever else you have to share on our monthly topics. You can get your material ready any time, and we will hold onto it until the topical month comes up.
