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Category Archives: Communication
Night at the Library
Celebrate National Library Week at the James J. Hill Center!
Join us as we celebrate the 60th anniversary of National Library Week with the theme “Libraries Lead.” Bring your friends and explore the legacy of our historic building and enjoy the Hill after hours for a night of refreshments, special tours, trivia and prizes. This is an opportunity to take action for libraries and continue to support our transformation.
Date: Wednesday, April 11th
Time: 4:30pm – 6:30pm
Where: James J. Hill Center, 80 West 4th Street, Saint Paul
Cost: Free
Light appetizers and beverages will be served.
Organizer
Lindsey Dyerldyer@jjhill.org
Office Hours for April!
Even though with all the recent snow it may not feel like April, it really is! And staying with our goal of making ourselves more accessible to our members, we are again switching the day of the week we will be holding CMLE Office Hours.
In April, we will be having Office Hours on Thursdays! So between 11am and 1pm we will be available at CMLE HQ to chat, no appointment needed, about all things libraries!
Why do we offer Office Hours? Well, a vital part of being a multitype library system like CMLE is that we want to be easily available to our members! You can always email us at admin@cmle.org or call our office, but sometimes it’s nice to be able to have a face-to-face conversation, especially if you need shared excitement for a new project, or sympathy for a challenge you’re experiencing.
Visit us on Thursdays (or email us at admin@cmle.org to schedule a different date/time!) and participate in some good library conversation and perhaps even a cheerful visit with Office Dog Lady Grey.
CMLE HQ is located at 570 1st St. SE St. Cloud MN 56304. We are in the cmERDC building right next to East Side Target.
Learning About Library Associations: Theater Library Association
Library science is an enormous field, home to every interest you could imagine! This means that there are many organizations out there for you to join, in order to connect with other people who share your professional interests.
So even if you work alone in your library, there are other people out there doing work similar to yours! Each week we will highlight a different library association for you to learn more about, and depending on your work, potentially join! You can also check out our page dedicated to Library Associations.
This week we’ll take a look at the Theater Library Association (TLA). This organization was founded in 1937 and “supports librarians and archivists that work with theater, dance, performance studies, popular entertainment, and motion picture and broadcasting collections.”
“TLA promotes professional best practices in acquisition, organization, access and preservation of performing arts resources in libraries, archives, museums, private collections, and the digital environment. By producing publications, conferences, panels, and public events, TLA fosters creative and ethical use of performing arts materials to enhance research, live performance, and scholarly communication.”
TLA has tons of different resources available. Take a look at their publications, which include Performing Arts Resources and TLA’s newsletter Broadside. They have this page dedicated to help with searching for library jobs and links to similar professional organizations that may be hiring. TLA also offers several different professional awards and scholarships.
TLA awards two different book awards each year, and they are now accepting nominations for the 2018 awards!
Check out their list of performing arts libraries, archives, and museums across the country, including the University of Minnesota’s Performing Arts Archives! They also have a membership directory (available to members only).
If you are interested in joining TLA, find more information on their membership page, then check out all the ways you can get involved!
Episode 310: Communication
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This week we are looking at strategies for communication! It’s a surprisingly tough skill, but we have some strategies.
Joining us is Guest Host Jami Trenam, from Great River Library System and the Minnesota Library Association Legislative Committee.
Communication is one of those leadership skills that seems like it should be so easy to do. However, everyone discovers that communicating with colleagues, patrons, Boards, funders, and community members is wildly complicated. It is so easy to issue directions, or to send out a policy, or to post news to your social media account. Just saying things is easy, and if that were the extent of true communication, it would be easy too.
Instead, you need to think of communication as a larger process, each step filled with the possibility of failure.
- In the first stage, you think of an idea inside your mind. Something is created there, and the goal is to get it pretty much intact into the mind of the person with whom you are communicating.
- Now, while holding onto that idea, you also need to think of a transmission system to get that idea across to the receiver. It may be audible speech, texting, video, gestures, written words or pictures, or other systems. You choose the one that you think will best get your idea intact over to the other person.
- The final step is receiving the information; it has to land in the brain of a recipient, and to be understood by that person, to be able to say communication was effective.
- Add in the possibility of noise, and it becomes even more amazing that anyone ever communicates anything to anyone! Noise happens when there is some sort of interruption in any stage of this process.
There are a few things you want to see in all of your communication, to help it to be the best darn information sharing process it can be:
- Accurate. This one should be obvious, but you only want to share information that you know is accurate. So, no passing on rumors. Definitely avoid lying directly about things. Not only do inaccuracies diminish the chances of effective communication, but they take away from your reputation as a leader – and that in itself can create noise in the communication process as people filter your message through the lens of “might be lying now.”
- Complete. When you are discussing the upcoming budget, it might be accurate to say you do not know what will happen. But it would be incomplete to leave out that you do know that every single other department is getting a 20% budget cut, and you are pretty sure your library will also get this news. Give the whole message.
- Clear. Avoid ambiguity in your message. Think through what you really want the other person to know, and say it in a way that is understandable for them. Don’t bother with using a lot of big, impressive words; getting across your message is more important.
- Meaningful. This is a big one for managers to think about as we communicate. We have a lot of information that we need to sift through, sort, understand, repackage, and distribute every day. But consider how much your 12-hour a week shelver is going to care about the intricate negotiations you are holding with the database vendors. Not much, usually. So pick your communication partners, and focus your message to ideas that person (or group) cares about – or needs to care about.
- Connection. If your cataloger tells you she’s nearly out of materials, and then you say it rained last night, you might both technically be communicating your ideas – but the lack of connection means this was still a communication flop. Respond to the message from your staffer first, and say “Okay, what do you need?” Then you can switch over to the fascinating topic of the weather.
- Confirmation. This one is pretty easy to do. Say things like “Does that make sense? Does that agree with your plan? What can you add here? Do you have questions?” Think about the final stage in our communication model above: the information has to be understood in the brain of the recipient.