Category Archives: Materials

CMLE, Guest Blogger, Materials

Report from CMLE Mini Grant: KEVA Blocks

This is a guest post from Technology Integrationist Jill Schmitt at Holdingford Elementary School. Need a Mini Grant to purchase materials or try an interesting new program at your library? Apply today! 

We are in the process of creating a Makerspace in our Elementary School here in Holdingford. The majority of materials will be housed in one part of the Media Center and made available to classes on a check out basis. These materials rely more heavily on teacher direction and supervision to prevent misuse and to carry out specific tasks.

In the library, however, we wanted our students to have an opportunity to build and create using easy to handle, durable materials without the need for direct instruction. After some experimentation with other building sets, we found KEVA planks suited our students PreK-6 the best. Unlike other products on the market which are made of plastic and include step by step directions, KEVA planks are made of wood and can be used for the construction of any number of creations. Students are able to make simple or complex designs based on their level of comfort. As you can see in the pictures, our students are enjoying their new building materials! Thank you so much CMLE for the mini grant making it possible to add these fantastic building planks to our library here at Holdingford Elementary School!  See link for more information. KEVA planks

CMLE, Guest Blogger, Materials

Report from CMLE Mini Grant: Books about Empathy

This is a guest post from Media Specialist Jenny McNew at Talahi Community School. Need a Mini Grant to purchase materials or try an interesting new program at your library? Apply today! 

As I watch the students I work with each day interact with each other it became clear to me that something was different and there seemed to be something missing since our students weren’t being very nice to each other. I pondered this feeling daily and it became clear to me as I watched their interactions that what was missing was kindness and empathy.  

I began to do a little research and found that empathy can and should be taught. As I thought about adding one more thing to the plates of our teachers, it was clear that a great way to teach these topics with an attentive audience was through books. Through a classroom mini-grant from CMLE I have been able to purchase some beautiful books that emulate these topics in an entertaining and engaging way. I purchased, “UnSelfie: Why Empathetic Kids Succeed in Our All-About-Me World” by Michele Borba as a professional read for staff to help them help students take on the skills of empathy and kindness. For student discussion I purchased 35 fabulous titles, some which come with great discussion questions to help facilitate conversations with kids.

What I loved about these books is the characters were a mirror of the students we teach. “Listening with My Heart: A Story of Kindness and Self-Compassion” by Gabi Garcia; “I Am Enough” by Grace Byers; “You, Me, and Empathy: Teaching children about empathy, feelings, kindness, compassion, tolerance, and recognizing bullying behaviors” by Jayneen Sanders. As I read to first graders I heard comments like, “Jade’s like Quinn” and “We are all more than enough!” Thank you CMLE for this wonderful addition to our library!

 

Academic, Materials

Recap: Florida State Cancels Bundled Journal Deal With Elsevier

Research Journals

Academic journals are a huge expense for any academic library. And Elsevier is often the public face of library fury over the intractable nature of pricing.

We are sharing this article with you, to give you some quick info on one aspect of a very large situation.

Written by Lindsay McKenzie, from Inside Higher Ed:

“Florida State University will cancel its comprehensive subscription to Elsevier journals.

Julia Zimmerman, dean of university libraries at Florida State, released a statement saying the decision to cancel the libraries’ “big deal” with Elsevier had been made after “long deliberation.”

“FSU is being charged too much — all because of a poorly thought-out 20-year-old contract between Elsevier and the State University System,” said Zimmerman. Florida currently pays just under $2 million a year for access to Elsevier content. She said other public universities are paying much less for the same content.

Zimmerman said that Florida had tried “every possible way” to negotiate a better deal, without success. “A partial cancellation is our only remaining option,” she said.

From January 2019, FSU will only subscribe to a subset of “most-needed journals” from Elsevier. Zimmerman said the cancellation would enable the library to acquire other materials requested by faculty, which had previously been denied.

This is not the first time that Florida State University has canceled a “big deal” with a publisher, according to SPARC’s Big Deal Cancellation Tracking resource. The institution canceled its Springer Nature package in 2015 after it transpired that FSU was being charged several times more than other Florida universities for the same product.

The Elsevier contract was based on enrollment at the time it was signed. Since then, some Florida universities have grown at faster rates than has Florida State.

A spokesman for the company said via email, “Elsevier provides different options for its customers, including all access options such as the Freedom Collection, as well as title by title options that provide customers flexibility to choose the most appropriate titles for their collections. We will look to work with FSU on the options that best meet the balance of their collection needs and costs.””

Guest Blogger, Materials, Services

Report from CMLE Mini Grant: LittleBits

This is a guest post from Sarah Gerber, 4th grade teacher at Talahi Community School.  She worked with their Media Specialist Jenny McNew to receive this CMLE Mini Grant. Need a Mini Grant to purchase materials or try an interesting new program at your library? Apply today! 

As part of our Grade 4 standards my students worked on circuits. While working  to STEMify our curriculum the students began using LittleBits to understand how circuits work and how to use them in the design process to create a machine that utilizes electronics.

My students were thoroughly engaged as they learned about inputs, outputs, wires, and power sources. They needed to rely on their collaboration and problem solving skills while following a guide to design an art invention tool. From there students could choose to create a design of their own to solve a real world problem. From using the buzzer for an alarm, to having light sensors help us navigate the dark, the students amazed me with their curiosity and perseverance in completing a design. It was common to hear, “This is so cool!” and “Oh, now I get it!”

LittleBits are an excellent tool to create projects that are STEM and STEAM related. They helped my students understand the MN standards on Energy and Engineering regardless of their technical ability. The color coded electronic “Bits” snap together magnetically and can be used to create many different inventions for multiple skill levels. We purchased the STEAM Student Set and found that it worked best in groups of two to three.

Materials

Visual Merchandising – Applying Bookstore Insights to Public Library Collections

1 Comment

Book display for Inspirational women

Check out this article from the Public Libraries journal, by Allison Marie Fiscus.  About the Author: Allison Marie Fiscus is Manager of the Maumee Branch at Toledo Lucas County (OH) Public Library. Contact Allison at allison.fiscus@toledolibrary.org.

What if I told you that the more intricate and thought out a book display, the less likely it is that a customer will actually touch a book on it, let alone check one out? What if I said that at best an overly constructed book display discourages circulation and at worst contributes to its decline? Counterintuitive though it may be, it’s the truth.

Bookstores figured this out long ago. It’s one of the main reasons that in a world populated by Amazon shoppers they have stayed in business. Conversely, public libraries nationwide have seen their circulation drop steadily as new ways of consuming text come into popularity.1

Why is it that we struggle to give away materials for free while Barnes and Noble keeps their people coming back to give them more of their hard-earned dollars?

The answer is visual merchandising. It’s not just a tool for retail establishments. As a veteran of the bookstore industry I’ve seen it in action, and I’m here to tell my fellow librarians that we can learn from what they’ve spent millions of dollars to research and implement.

Keep It Simple

Don’t spend excessive amounts of time carefully creating a display based on a topical theme. Instead, curate displays based on a very general idea or genre. Mystery titles, biographies, juvenile fiction, holidays, cooking—pick your prettiest book covers or the titles you have in largest quantity and display them simply and prominently (more on this in a moment). These displays will be easy to refill and can be used to help struggling books circulate purely by being out in the open. And make no mistake; being able to refill your displays quickly is key. A full display is an inviting display and these books will go.

New Books Are “New” to Your Patrons Far Longer Than They Are to You

Dedicate a large space to prominently displaying new books with their covers facing out. If possible, keep books in this “new” section for at least twelve months. Consider this: per capita, U.S. library users visit a library less than five times a year.2 With that in mind, highlighting books as new for twelve months makes perfect sense and arguably is still not a sufficient amount of time for your customers to fully grasp what you have to offer. Make it easy on them to find new titles and they will reward your efforts with circs.

Take the Time to Study How Your Customers Move Through Your Library

Find an hour every day for a week and sketch a heat map of where your customers travel upon entering your building. The results may very well surprise you and will definitely help you to better understand where displays should be placed to support interaction. It’s easy to look at your library and see where you can fit a display, but if the majority of your customers are coming through the door, walking directly to the hold shelf/computers/quiet study, and back out the front door again, they aren’t seeing your display on the slat wall behind your fiction stacks. Put the books where the customers already are. Once you get their attention their user habits very well may change, at which point you can push displays into new and deeper areas of your space.

Get Creative (With Your Furniture)!

Extra table lying around? Display space! Short shelving units? Display space! Unused atlas stand? Display space! Before you commit to spending gobs of hard-won funding on new furniture and shelving to support your displays, take a hard look at what you have and what can be tastefully repurposed. Shift collections to different areas and don’t give valuable shelving real estate to collections that will circulate anyways. However, avoid using temporary furniture such as folding tables for display. Sadly, these look sloppy no matter how much work you put into making them presentable.

(Read the rest of this article here!! Get some great ideas for your own displays – and share photos with us!!)