We love connecting with our members in person! It’s even more fun when food is involved, so we are having another CMLE Social Event taking place at Old Chicago in St. Cloud. This will be a dinner event beginning at 5:30pm, but we need your help picking a date! Vote below and we’ll send out a notice of the final date.
As a multitype library system, one of our main goals is to provide connections between all different types of libraries: schools, history centers, museums, academic libraries, etc! One of our favorite ways to do this is through hosting social events where people from all types of libraries are free to get together and chat about library life.
Thanks to all of you that have already voted! If you haven’t yet, tell us which dates could work for you! We can’t wait to hear all about your experiences in the library world this fall!
Have you participated in webinars, done online training, or taken online classes? Then you should definitely celebrate National Online Learning Day on September 15th!
Wondering how to celebrate this holiday? Take a look at this article from Fuel Education, which has a few suggestions, including using the hashtag #OnlineLearningDay when you share your own experiences with online learning on social media!
Or you could check out our Continuing Education Calendar, updated frequently to bring you library-related training opportunities, many of which are online or free!
Interested in the impact of online learning in K-12 education? This article from Learning.com discusses some benefits like access and personalization that can come from incorporating online learning.
Finally, maybe the best way to celebrate the day is to get online and learn something new! Learn a new language, practice your music theory, or join a Twitter chat about a topic you are interested in.
There is a whole world of news happening across the profession. Below are a few links to get you started with some of the exciting things happening in the world of Library Science!
We hope that you have been enjoying CMLE’s podcasts: Linking Our Libraries and Reading With Libraries! We have so much fun sharing library training information and exploring different book genres with you. We’ve also learned (and continue to learn!) a ton about the process of putting together a podcast.
So we thought we should share some of that knowledge with you! There are several great library podcasts out there in addition to ours; check out this post that lists a few of them. But what if you want to start your own? We’ve compiled a list with photos and affiliate links to Amazon (if you make any purchases through these, a small portion is donated to CMLE!) to help show you the supplies we use for our podcast. When we were first starting, we wished for a list like this to help take some of the guesswork out of it!
(Note: there are definitely alternative ways to podcast, and your taste or need for equipment may be different than ours. We are not experts but felt the need to share what we have learned!)
Download your software. We use Audacity (it’s free!) for recording and editing and winLAME for converting the audio files into mP3 format.
You will need a host for your audio files, and we use LibSyn which works nicely with our WordPress website. LibSyn also allows you to embed audio players into your website and social media platforms.
Below is the way we situate our mics. We updated the mic stands we use and purchased these desktop adjustable models. They are more portable and easier to see over than our old stands. Another component of this picture is the pop filter. We use DragonPad Pop Filters.
Finally, this is the mixer that we use. You may not need one with this many capabilities, but since we want to be able to record from four mics at once, we needed a mixer with space to plug in four mics. Keep in mind that you’ll need a USB cord to connect the mixer to your computer! The mixer we use is the Behringer Xenyx 1204 USB and it contains phantom power which we need to power the mics. We definitely do not know even half of this mixer’s full capabilities but hope to continue learning more!
Please let us know if you have any questions about this process and we will answer them to the best of our ability! We are not podcasting experts but enjoy continuing to learn all the neat capabilities that our equipment can do for us!
We love sharing library and book information and connecting with our awesome community. And a GIANT thank you to all our members who have been Guest Hosts on the show! 🙂
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 are going to take a look at the Western Association of Map Libraries. “The Western Association of Map Libraries is an independent association of map librarians and other people with an interest in maps and map librarianship. Membership in WAML is open to any individual interested in furthering the purpose of the Association, which is “to encourage high standards in every phase of the organization and administration of map libraries.”
“Founded in 1967, WAML was the first independent organization centered on map collections and the librarians who oversee them. Academic libraries have always been strongly represented in the membership, but members also hail from public libraries, private collections, and government and commercial entities, or have been simply aficionados of maps and cartographic information. While paper map collections were traditionally the focus of attention, the advent of geographic information systems (GIS) and other digital platforms for geospatial data have led to a change in emphasis.”
WAML’s website includes a Map Librarians’ Toolbox full of resources including links to cataloging and processing tools as well as equipment and supplies.
Read more about WAML through their publications, one of which is open access!
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