Category Archives: Programs
Fun With Falcons – at the library!
There are a lot of interesting webcams out there, with a lot of little animals you can watch in safety (to you and for them). And of course, libraries are getting in on the action of animal webcams!
The Evanston Public Library has had a pair of falcons nesting there for several years. This year the new female laid four eggs, and they have all hatched!
“Peregrine falcons have been nesting at the library since 2004. They occupy the nest (scrape) from March until June each year. There is an Evanston Peregrine Falcon Watch group for posting and sharing news and observations of the Evanston Peregrine Falcons. Scientists from the Field Museum’s Chicago Peregrine Program band the young falcons each year.”
While it may not be a program all libraries can have, you can certainly enjoy watching the baby library falcons on their live cam!
Spotlight Program: Frankenstein @ 200
At CMLE, we so enjoy all our different types of libraries, archives, and other members! Seeing all the work you are doing is so inspiring; and we want to return the favor by helping you to find some of the great programming going on around the profession.
Each week we will share an interesting program we find. It may inspire you to do exactly the same thing; or to try something related; or just to try out some different programming ideas.
Books are fun – and it’s especially fun to have anniversaries of books you have enjoyed! Check out this blog article from Colleen Whittall, Teen Services Librarian, Saratoga Springs (NY) Public Library, talking about the 200th anniversary of Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein!
“Time flies! It’s been 200 years since Mary Shelley published “Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus.” The literary world is celebrating, and there are plenty of ways for you and your library to take part.
Frankengeeks (and not-so-geeks) have many opportunities to explore the gothic masterpiece this year. Nominated by PBS as one of the must-reads in the series “The Great American Read,” 2018 marks multiple readathons, symposiums and new editions, so it’s easy to get involved no matter the size or budget of your library.
Here are a few ideas for programming around this bicentennial year.
Where to start?
For starters, I would suggest checking out Frankenreads.org, organized by the Keats-Shelley Association of America and in partnership with the NEH. Their goal is to “…[encourage] people around the world to organize or participate in events celebrating the novel — especially by conducting public readathons of the entire novel on Halloween Day 2018 and in ‘Frankenweek,’ October 24-31, 2018.” Sign up online to find events or submit your own. It’s a fabulous resource for programming, collaboration and event planning.
Frankenstein 2018 is project based at Volda University College in Norway. Its goal is to “provide accessible information about the novel, its author and its remarkable afterlife. [It aims] to stimulate a wider creative and intellectual engagement with Frankenstein and its legacy throughout this bicentennial year, and to act as a place of record for that engagement.” Still under construction, the site hosts a great animated TED Talk video for those who haven’t read the book in a while and want to revisit some primary themes. It’s also just fun to watch.
The Frankencities Project is a visual art application of “Frankenstein themes to the urban form.” The site’s gallery evokes haunting dystopian futures of global cities, claiming “Shelley’s Frankenstein … may well provide a pathway to predict the character of our cities as they change over the near future.” I can see an art project such as this going over well with my library teens.
Explore the original text
In commemoration, Penguin Random House is publishing the complete 1818 text (January 2018), which “preserves the hard-hitting and politically-charged aspects of Shelley’s original writing, as well as her unflinching wit and strong female voice.”
This edition includes a new introduction and suggestions for further reading by National Book Critics Circle award-winner and Shelley expert Charlotte Gordon, literary excerpts and reviews selected by Gordon, and a chronology and essay by preeminent Shelley scholar Charles E. Robinson.
The preface is particularly enlightening, as it briefly contextualizes the circumstances that brought Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley into the fray of outcasted Romantic poets that resulted in “Frankenstein” (and vampires!). Please check out this amazing infographic and feel all the things. Two hundred years later, “Frankenstein” manages to be timely as hell.
Revisit the science
The science behind “Frankenstein” is timely, too. We print prosthetics and are working on growing organs in a lab now!
As shocking and blasphemous as “Frankenstein” was when it was published, Shelley was influenced by the rudimentary biomedical discoveries of her time, including electricity. The fascination with re-animation is perpetual, and “Frankenstein” continues to make its way into the modern medical literature.
Check out Science Mag’s article on what modern technologies Shelley might have described if the book were written today.
Tie it to Halloween
“Frankenstein” is a classic year-round, but there’s nothing wrong with using the advantage of Halloween hype to bring attention to your library event(s).
Along with a Frankenreads readathon, my library is toying with the idea of putting together a library-wide Frankenstein-themed escape game in October. After attending a fabulous workshop hosted by staff from the Museum of Intrigue in Syracuse, N.Y. (who you should totally visit or hit up for a workshop), staff feels enthusiastic to take our BreakoutEDU-style escape games to the next level. We learned that adding actors, audio and other physical, tactile and experimental puzzle types can add a lot of depth to the experience.
The possibilities for passive and active programming are endless for all ages, including displays, read-a-thons, easy crafts for kids, film fests (maybe get a film student to talk about the many films), science-y talks (university professor?), etc.
And, of course, screen the films
Speaking of film fests, there’s really no reason not to have one. If you are a public library and you use Movie Licensing USA (Swank), you have licensing rights to screen over 28 “Frankenstein” films, including the classic 1931 Boris Karloff version so many of us are seeing in our heads at this very moment!
Just for the fun of it, and if you are a theater buff, you may be able to catch a screening of the 2011 live-filmed National Theater production of “Frankenstein,” starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Johnny Lee Miller.”
Notable Dates For Your Noggin: June 2018
Each month we’ll bring you a compiled list of fun national holidays, birthdays of authors, and publication dates of favorite books. You can use these for your own personal use or for some library inspiration! Share what inspired you in the comments.
June is National Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Month! Other things to celebrate in June:
Podcasting With CMLE: It’s Kind Of A Big Deal
We love working at CMLE! Our jobs are to figure out new and effective ways to share information about our members and with our members, and also with the larger library community. This so often involves going outside (waaaaay outside!) our comfort zones, as we try new things and learn new things ourselves!
One of these new things that we have learned is podcasting.
When we started this, we had literally no idea what we were doing. Angie spent hours watching YouTube videos and reading websites, trying to figure out what equipment we needed, how to fit it together, and how to make it work. Mary battled with recalcitrant websites we needed to cooperate (whyyyyyyy can’t tech instructions just include ALL THE INSTRUCTIONS????), and worked out format for content and delivery.
This was the birth of our library training podcast: Linking Our Libraries.
Things went….okay.
This is a photo of our early days in podcasting! We had a teeny mixer! We only had two mics! That holder on the left didn’t even work – so feel free to admire our stack of boxes that kept the mic off the desk! Our scripts were ideas more than content! When we had guests, we had to take turns sharing the mics!
But you know – we just dove in and started swimming around in the world of podcasting. And we knew we had a ways to go (the scripts for Season One are…not awesome – sorry!), but we felt pretty confident we could grow and improve.
And we did!! Check out a more recent look at our recording studio! Fancier mixer, four mics with pop filters. The mic stands (usually) work. Our pretty colored strings of lights is kind of washed out here (sorry!), but you can see where they hang down over our office plants and our library collection. We work in a warehouse with no windows in the building, so we brought in windows; you can see our view of Venice there on the upper right. You can also see some of our office decorations (our transition from spring to summer!), and in the bottom left you can see the cup-holder on Angie’s bike desk.
Our content is snappier, and is easier to find on our website. Our Guest Hosts continue to be impressive! That hasn’t changed – but we are fortunate to have ever-more people coming to share their ideas and experiences with us. Our sound is better. In short, things are going pretty well!
So well, in fact, that started a second podcast!
We started Books and Beverages with great triumph! Great, inside our office, at least!! (That counts.) We had awesome guests, we had fun beverages, we had good content, and it was all pretty fun. It was a book group that anyone could join, and anyone could enjoy – and we loved hearing from people that they did indeed enjoy it!
We now run podcast seasons that are 15 episodes long. We drop a new episode every single Thursday. Last Thursday was the final episode of Season Three of Linking Our Libraries – where we presented a tool kit of 15 skills library managers will need to be successful. (They will help everyone to really be good in your library!) This Thursday, we will begin Season Two of our book group podcast: Reading With Libraries!
To make all of this good stuff happen, we had to keep buying equipment, keep paying to host not one but two podcasts, and other assorted supplies. (I think we have spent hours staring at different cords to potentially buy. HOURS!)
During the off season for the book group, we have worked on making improvements. One of those is to change the name. (We discovered that our first name was impossible to find on podcast apps – not ideal for us!) Another is to change podcast hosts – which has required dozens (and dozens and dozens) of hours to copy over our archive, to figure out a whole new system, and to make things look good. (That part is Angie; she handles the office needs in art, music, and making things look good!)
Starting Thursday May 17, our “new” podcast will debut! We are now called Reading With Libraries!!! If you joined our book group last season, you will recognize the same pieces:
- new genre each week!
- fun Guest Hosts!
- beverages themed to match the weekly genre!
- handy Reader’s Advisory material, to help you find and recommend books in each genre!
BUT! Things are even better this season! We had such fun last season talking for 20 minutes (the limit of the hosting plan we were paying for) that this season we have extended it to 30 minutes! It goes by really fast, but there is so much to say in every episode we don’t want you to miss a moment of it.
AND! Our new podcast host will allow us to add a streaming player right on our website page! If you do not want to download it to your device, it will be so very easy to just hit a play button on our site and enjoy it all! (I’ve been listening to Season One episodes to test them – and just because I’m laughing out loud in my office while I’m listening!)
AND!! Check out this excellent new logo!!
Angie made it! And I love it!! So when you see it, you know: Good times are ahead, with books, with fun guests, with tasty beverages – it’s the whole package!!
What do we need now???
YOU!!!
We want you to enjoy the podcast! We want you to enjoy the book group! And we want you to feel like you are part of the community!
HOW can you do this?
- Subscribe to the podcast: Reading With Libraries on any podcast app!
- Stream episodes on our website!
WHAT else is new for you??
We invite you to join us on Patreon!
If this is a new thing for you – no worries! Patreon is a website that will allow you to choose a level of monthly support for us (and all kinds of your favorite writers, artists, and other such people). We, in return, provide you with some nice rewards, and there will be some special content along the way that is only for Patreon supporters.
You can choose to support us at $1 a month – the Folio level. This is paying less than one dollar for each episode we provide to you. (It’s 80 cents per episode – a bargain!) At this level, you get: Our mushy, sincere thanks! Access to Discord chat with fellow book group members! And a postcard from Mary, Angie, and Official Office Dog Lady Grey!
You could choose to support us at the Octavo Level: $5 a month. Your rewards (besides the glow of helping out some struggling podcasters!): Everything from the folio level, plus we mention you in an upcoming episode!
We have assorted other levels of possible support, so feel free to browse around the page
PLUS!! Lady Grey, the Official Office Dog, has played a larger role in this season’s episodes! You will occasionally hear her in the background, and she was in-house for most of our recordings. (She was used as a shameless bribe to lure Guest Hosts over to see us; and everyone came out of that as a winner!) You can see her in the Patreon page, serving as the face of the different reward levels. (Really – go admire her! She’s super cute!!)
We have extra expenses in making this podcast, and we could really use your help to defray the costs of creating, mixing, producing, and publishing a podcast out every single week. (Plus: Lady Grey needs treats! She’s not our main expense, but come on – look at that face. She clearly needs some financial support!)
AND!! We are working to build up a community on the chat service Discord. This is a reward through Patreon. There will be opportunities to talk about your favorite books, to look for books, and to chat about all kinds of things! You may already be using Discord for other Patreon accounts (I’m pretty dedicated to my Kitten Academy chats!), or for other uses. We are excited to have the chance to try out a new technology that already has over 100 million people from around the world! (Will you meet new book friends from every single continent there? While we can’t promise that – it is possible!!)
Thank you in advance! Your positive comments, and your listening to the podcasts, really keep us going!! We appreciate your support, however you are able to show it!
We want to keep building our community of wonderful library and book people; we appreciate you contributing to making that possible!