Category Archives: Conference

Guest Blogger: Teen Lit Con 2017 Recap!

This is a guest post from Bethany Kauffman, Media Specialist at Rogers High School, about attending Twin Cities Teen Lit Con 2017.

There is something special about finding “your people” in the world.  As book lovers, we seem to find our kindred spirits almost organically at work, church and in our neighborhoods.  Finding “your people” is such an important part of life that I relish any chance to help my students meet and connect with other teen book lovers like them.  CMLE made that happen for Rogers and Sauk Rapids – Rice high school students this past spring.

On Saturday, May 6 2017 at Henry Sibley High School, Minnesota’s metro public libraries brought one of the most popular and controversial authors of the moment to Twin Cities teens.  Sauk Rapids – Rice and Rogers High Schools were able to load up teenagers and get them to St. Paul for the big event through the support of CMLE.  What made the day so hype-worthy was that we saw, wait for it… Jay Asher!  Yes, that Jay Asher, whose books had suddenly become the topic of controversy and passion with the airing of 13 Reasons Why on Netflix.

Adults had suddenly become aware of Jay Asher and his writing, his honest conversations about hard subjects and the power that words and ideas can have in a teenager’s life.  Those of us who work with teens, read YA and love the awkward eagerness of all things before age 25 already knew all about Jay Asher.  We spend our days talking to young adults about serious and not so serious topics.  Sometimes hair color and friend drama is as deep as it gets but that’s what makes this age so great.  They are thinking, growing, learning, observing, trying on different personas nearly every week and they aren’t shocked when a YA book tackles a tough topic like suicide.  Young adults welcome stories that push the edges and make them think deeply about life.

As a result, I wasn’t surprised when we were packed into the auditorium at Henry Sibley High and the atmosphere was what I can only describe as electric.  It was the first session of what was going to be a day filled with book-loving kindred spirits galore.  When Jay Asher, Jeff Zentner, Box Brown and Meg Medina walked onto the stage for the first author panel of the day the auditorium exploded with the kinds of screams and roars and clapping that is usually only heard at a rock concert.  I am not kidding.  The teenagers shook the roof!  Let that soak in.  Teenagers screaming their heads off, nearly fainting over authors not athletes, millionaires, movie stars or music icons.  They were with their people and they were screaming at the top of their lungs for what they loved – ideas, emotions and creativity in books.

The rest of the day went well.  It followed a typical conference schedule with a variety of sessions and activities.  The teens had opportunities to be a part of several writing workshops, meet Minnesota authors, buy books, get autographs, try out Book Speed Dating, discuss creative nonfiction, find out about the behind-the-scenes work of creating graphic novels and meet real book editors.  One of the most highly attended sessions dealt with mental health issues in YA lit.  You literally could not get in the door of that session it was so full.  There were also t-shirts and concessions and an exhibit hall and temporary tattoos.  All good events have temporary tattoos.

When the afternoon came to an end, my 11 students from Rogers High School and the 25 students from Sauk Rapids – Rice High School piled into the bus and started home.  I was so grateful that we joined the teens from another high school for the long ride.  There were plenty of awkward introductions and graphic novel discussions and shy exchanges of artwork and books between students who had never met before.  Book lovers find common ground quickly and everyone headed home happy.  CMLE was the impetus behind this amazing day.  They encouraged us to coordinate between our schools, facilitated our communication and awarded us a grant to cover the cost of the bus.  As a result, this day was free to our students and for several of them, I’m sure, that made attending Teen Lit Con possible.

The new school year is here and it’s once again time to bring teens and books together.  It’s time to start fostering relationships that drifted over the summer, get the book clubs up and running, unpack the first book order of the year AND it’s time to talk to our teens about Twin Cities Teen Lit Con 2018.  Why not join us?  Rogers High School is going to make sure we are at the next convention.  We’d love to connect with your teens and share the love of all things authors, illustrators, writers and YA lit with you.  Start thinking now about giving your teens the opportunity to find “their people” at Twin Cities Teen Lit Con in the spring.

https://teenlitcon.com/

Bethany Kauffman
Media Specialist
Book Club Advisory
Rogers High School
Rogers, MN
bethany.kauffman@isd728.org

Announcement: Open Repositories 2018 – Bozeman, Montana, USA

Sign on southwest side of campus - Montana State University - Bozeman, Montana - 2013-07-09

Mary’s note: If you have not been to this area yet, I can tell you that it is absolutely beautiful! Bozeman itself is great, and has a wonderful public library; and the National Parks nearby are some of the most amazing places I have ever seen. If you are interested in this topic, consider attending. We have some scholarship money available to help defray costs!

Press Release:

“Bozeman, MT — Montana State University is pleased to announce the 13th annual Open Repositories conference June 4-7th, 2018 in Bozeman, Montana.

We are excited to host Open Repositories 2018 in this beautiful place. We encourage you to discover more about BozemanMontana State University, the state of MontanaGlacier National Park, and Yellowstone National Park as we plan for the conference.

Montana State University is a world-class research university tucked into a small mountain town just North of Yellowstone National Park. Home to both the rugged outdoors and exciting cultural activities downtown, Bozeman has something for everyone. The university is a mid-sized doctoral granting institution with a rich research enterprise, and the library is dedicated to repository innovation. OR2018 on the campus of Montana State University will be an invigorating educational meeting in the grandeur of the Rocky Mountains.

The annual Open Repositories Conference brings together users and developers of open digital repository platforms from higher education, government, galleries, libraries, archives and museums. The Conference provides an interactive forum for delegates from around the world to come together and explore the global challenges and opportunities facing libraries and the broader scholarly information landscape.

http://or2018.net

Holly Mercer

Associate Dean for Research, Collections, & Scholarly Communication and Professor

Director, Newfound Press

The University of Tennessee, Knoxville

UT Libraries

611 John C. Hodges Library

1015 Volunteer Blvd.

Knoxville, TN 37996-0000

hollymercer@utk.edu

American Libraries Association Annual Conference: Chicago June 2017

ALA Annual Conference & Exhibition, Chicago, June 22-27, 2017. Transforming our libraries, ourselves.

At CMLE we always encourage people to attend conferences. It’s a great way to keep up on interesting developments in the profession, to find people who do what you do professionally, and to enjoy yourself with a bunch of other library people! You can learn things, meet people, and make all kinds of connections in a way that takes longer and is harder to do online.

Note: The Minnesota Library Association Annual Conference, and the ITEM Annual Conference are both coming up in October!! We have scholarship money for you, to help defray the cost! These are just great opportunities for you, no matter what you do in a library; so consider attending! You can always contact us here at CMLE to ask questions about conferences, to talk about ideas you have, or just to get tips on attending.

Below is a quick recap of my trip to the ALA Annual Conference. This is such a huge conference that any individual look at it is just overwhelming with the amount of possible things to do, people to meet, and information to absorb! Browse around the website for yourself, to find all kinds of info; and check on social media to follow the #ALALeftBehind hashtag. If you are in a library or archive or museum or history center, or even if you just like books – this is YOUR conference!!

It is held this week  every year – please check it out for yourself in future years! There is also a Midwinter conference every year in late January, where the focus is on vendor exhibits and meetings with committees. Check out the meeting locations for the next ten years, so you can start making plans to attend now! (There are several coming up in Chicago over the next few years; this is ALA’s home, and being so close to us is a real bonus!)

There were more than 700 vendors at this conference, and you can see them all here. Hundreds of authors were there; you can see them all here. Over 2,000 sessions were held, on every topic you can imagine (and some that will boggle your mind!); you can browse all of them here. Whether or not you were able to attend a session, if something seems really important to you, or valuable to your work, or you just get excited about the topic, you can contact the presenter directly (do some Googling!)  and ask for information or slides or any handouts. Most presenters are happy to share their information – that is why they are at the conference. And as a frequent conference presenter myself, I can say that it feels great when people are interested in your work!

We will have all kinds of material available here at CMLE HQ; so feel free to come look through it all! Yes, I also picked up a lot of giveaways for you guys! We will be distributing out Advance Reader Copies (ACRs) of books not yet published, all kinds of pins to show library pride, posters, and other assorted items! (I have a plastic sandwich holder for some lucky person!) We will get some of this up on our website, so you know what we have available; but don’t hesitate to stop by and just browse! We have two large flat-rate post office boxes full of stuff, plus my backpack jammed full of things, plus a Trader Joe’s canvas bag stuffed with material we want to share with you. Make our distribution work easier by coming over to browse for yourself!

Continue reading American Libraries Association Annual Conference: Chicago June 2017

Day Twenty Seven of the CMLE Summer Fun Library Tour!

Image result for batgirl librarian
Batgirl was a librarian!

Looking at the Socialization of LIS Students
Through a Pop Culture Lens

This is a little bit of self-promotion, but the fun kind! A few years ago my research partner and I wanted to watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer reruns; but we had very demanding jobs that required us to be working all the time. So we had to work out a way to make watching Buffy into work.

Reader, we did it.

We both like pop culture, and as professors we frequently used pop culture images and ideas to illustrate points in library work. Students would identify with pop culture material, and use it to help incorporate the ideas we were discussing in class into their own professional images they were developing.

We wanted to find out how common this was, so we did a survey of library students across the country to find out what kinds of pop culture images they like, that they shared with others, and were using in their professional development. You can flip through our article to see what all we found; one of the biggies was how very cool students are, and how much pop culture they knew!

Libraries, as well as archives and museums and other information-focused professions, are very well represented across all sorts of pop culture images and ideas. So be proud, and seize your own professional identity ideas from the wide range of pop culture images out there!

CMLE Scholarship Recipients from FY17!

We are happy to celebrate the recipients of CMLE Scholarships from Fiscal Year 2017! We are so glad they took advantage of our scholarship program in order to attend several different conferences, which you can read about from the links below.

If you are planning on doing some professional development next year by attending conferences or taking part in continuing education, we invite you to apply for a CMLE Scholarship! More information can be found here. If you are looking for some Continuing Education opportunities, make sure to check out our Google Calendar.

Read about our CMLE Scholarship recipients from Fiscal Year 2017 below:

As we near the end of this fiscal year, we encourage you to think ahead to Continuing Education opportunities for next year, and to keep CMLE scholarships in mind to help with the financial aspect of your professional growth!