Category Archives: Materials

Communication, Materials

New Minnesota Reflections website is faster and mobile-friendly

From Minitex, by Zachariah Miller

The Minnesota Digital Library has launched a faster, mobile-friendly website for it’s primary project, Minnesota Reflections. Minnesota Reflections is a database of 53,967 digitized original materials shared by 190 cultural heritage organizations located across Minnesota. The new site was announced today at the MDL Annual Meeting in St. Paul by Jason Roy, head of the University of Minnesota Libraries’ Digital Library Services unit.

In his announcement, Roy highlighted the new site’s faster load times, phone- and tablet-friendly layouts, and several powerful new features:

  • Site visitors can now browse the collection geographically by zooming into a map and clicking on pins.
  • New, easy-to-use search-limiting facets enable users to quickly narrow their search results by type (still image, text, etc.), date, topic, contributing organization, and many more.
  • Users can easily view audio and video content directly on the site using updated streaming technology, including captioning.
  • Social sharing links and citations in multiple formats make it simple for users to cite content and share it.

The project team included Scott Hreha, Link Swanson, and Paul Swanson from the Minitex IT unit and Jason Roy and Chad Fennell of the University of Minnesota Libraries’ Digital Library Services unit. The site is located at reflections.mndigital.org.

Materials, Resources

Minnesota’s tribal libraries: Fostering digital inclusion

Think-Inclusion

from Minitex, by Hannah Buckland

“Minnesota’s eleven tribal nations are sovereign nations and have the right to self-govern. Self-governance includes but is not limited to managing tribal lands and natural resources, defining tribal membership, regulating tribally owned businesses, administering tribal law enforcement, and engaging in government-to-government relationships at the federal level.

Information access, exchange, and preservation strengthen all of these areas; as more information is stored, organized, and communicated digitally, access to affordable high-speed broadband, devices, and digital literacy training also become interwoven necessities for Native nation rebuilding. Tribal libraries—with public computers, free Internet access, and patient staff—are well positioned to foster these connections in support of sovereignty.

Digital inclusion, which the National Digital Inclusion Alliance defines as “the activities necessary to ensure that all individuals and communities … have access to and use of Information and Communication Technologies,” is a complex, evolving process aiming to “reduce and eliminate historical, institutional, and structural barriers” so “all individuals and communities have the information technology capacity needed for full participation” in society.

But in tribal libraries, this concept of “inclusion” can be deceptive: Simply including tribes within existing non-tribal frameworks undermines sovereignty. Instead, digital inclusion efforts in tribal communities must start from the ground and build their way up. The digital-inclusion-services tribal libraries implement are rooted in each tribe’s specific needs, strengths, environments, histories, sociopolitical contexts, economic development plans, and future goals.

When developing digital inclusion services, however, tribal libraries face added challenges of basic connectivity: Broadband availability in Minnesota’s tribal communities lags behind that of the rest of the state. According to a 2016 federal report, “Tribal Broadband: Status of Deployment and Federal Funding Programs,” 33 percent of people living on tribal lands in Minnesota are, by state definition, “unserved,” compared to 12 percent of all Minnesota households as detailed in the 2016 FCC Broadband Progress Report.

The Association of Tribal Archives, Libraries, and Museums (ATALM) documents similar disparities in its 2014 report, “Digital Inclusion in Native Communities: The Role of Tribal Libraries.” ATALM’s report states that only 89 percent of tribal libraries surveyed were able to offer Internet access to their communities. Likewise, while virtually 100 percent of rural public libraries reportedly provide public computers, only 86 percent of tribal libraries do. And while 87 percent of rural public libraries provide technology training, only 42 percent of tribal libraries have the capacity to do so.

Funding is central to this conversation. In Minnesota, tribal libraries can leverage basic resources from Minitex, but often depend wholly on federal grants to sustain and develop their own services. Funding levels may fluctuate drastically from year to year, particularly during federal upheaval. At the same time, even when funding is available, small libraries with three or fewer staff can become overwhelmed when grant administration is added an already demanding workload.

Implementing digital inclusion services can be difficult, but sustaining and expanding these services is even more challenging. And yet this is what tribal libraries do: Confront seemingly impossible challenges in order to strengthen tribal sovereignty and uphold cultural expression.”

CMLE, Conference, Materials, Resources, Training

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 →

Materials, Services

Ideas for old audio-visual materials

What I Talk about When I Talk about Running, by Haruki Murakami

 

 

 

We are passing on request from a library person from a listserve, along with a few suggestions from other people. Do you have this issue? Do you have other ideas? Suggest them in the comments!

“Does anyone have suggestions on what to do with audio books on cd, music cds, dvds, etc. that are coming in for our book sale that we are not selling?  Our book sale staff hates to throw them out and would like to give them away if someone could use them.”

Continue reading Ideas for old audio-visual materials →

Materials, Resources, Special

Discover rare archives online from the Delaware Art Museum

Are you interested in archives, digitization projects, or art? Then you will definitely appreciate this news from the Delaware Art Museum!

Recently, they launched their new web-based platform which allows selections of their archival material to be viewed online. Some of this material includes “original letters from Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti to his mistress, photographs of artist and illustrator John Sloan in his studio, and scrapbooks chronicling the Museum’s history.”

Through the Delaware Heritage Collection, The Helen Farr Sloan Library & Archives has digitized for free access some of their most famous collections, including the “John Sloan, Howard Pyle, and Samuel and Mary R. Bancroft, Jr. Pre-Raphaelite Manuscript Collections.”

There are currently 500 archival items available online, with more being added daily and plans for hundreds more to be added this summer. The museum is excited to reach more members of their audience and to be better equipped to handle research and reference requests.

Read more about this project here!