At CMLE Headquarters, we want to help members with access to resources and ideas from across the profession and our professional organizations. This press release, copied below, is timely in discussing an issue that is being widely pondered by librarians, teachers, parents, and everyone else: how libraries can respond with information assistance after the election. Any election and post-election season is filled with excitement, changes, and a rapid flow of all kinds of information, and this one has had all of that.
Libraries are here to help people sort through that information, to figure out what is real and meaningful, and to understand how information can apply to patrons and to their communities.
We love our Imagination Library books! Especially since they are board books and therefore chew-safe 🙂
If you are a book-lover and have small children at home under the age of five, you should definitely know about this program! Imagination Library was founded by country singer Dolly Parton to promote literacy and an early love of books in children by mailing them a book each month, no matter the income level of the household.
The United Way of Central Minnesota has been taking part in this program, and if you live in the area, here is where you can sign up! (Tip: it does take several weeks until you receive your first book, so don’t procrastinate!) Each child from birth to their fifth birthday will receive a book in the mail each month. The program has become so popular that it has continued into Canada and the U.K.
You can get more information about the program from their website, or keep up with the book selections and other news on their blog. Also, check out CMLE’s previous post about the program when Imagination Library was donating their 1 millionth book!
By now, you’ve probably noticed that each week we’ve been sharing a tip from Carson Tate’s book Work Simply on how to streamline your life. Here at CMLE, we found Tate’s book incredibly valuable and thought it would resonate with many of you, too. We hope this has been the case, and that you have found these tips useful in your daily activities!
This post is simply to remind you of the source of that content: Carson Tate’s Work Simply. Before beginning the series, we reached out to her to request her permission to incorporate her content into our posts. We were so pleased when she was willing to do so! It was a great reminder that sometimes taking a chance does pay off.
Have any of the Strategies to Simplify tips we have shared worked particularly well for you? We’d love to hear about it! Leave us a comment or send us an email. We will continue to share tips beginning again next week.
If you missed any of the series so far, catch up now:
A quick update on the CMLE travel bug progress! We have dropped another travel bug – this one in Quarry Park near St Cloud.
This TB is called “Libraries Rock” and is hidden in a very nice cache just off a trail in the park. You can go out there, and hunt for the Cable Merger cache, find this travel bug, blow bubbles with it if you wish, and then take it to its next location – preferably near a library!
We are always looking for tools to share information, to connect with library people, and to just enjoy it all! We hope you will get involved in caching and finding – or placing – caches and travel bugs, in your library or elsewhere. Go enjoy yourself, and find some caches!
Banned Books Week has come and gone – and we are looking forward to next year! But the issue of censorship regarding the books that young people are able to read continue all year long. This great article from boingboing.net shares that, “Some of the most frequently challenged books are the very books that young readers say are especially important and meaningful to them.”
Adults tend to worry about kids being exposed to ideas or beliefs that differ from their own. They also worry about allowing young people access to books that feature content such as sexuality, racial and ethnicity issues, violence, drugs, body image, and more. However, as the article claims, this controversial content can actually help kids and young people learn, empathize, and grow.
The authors of the article contacted eight writers including Lois Lowry, Chris Crutcher, and Rainbow Rowell to see if they would be willing to share messages they have received from young readers detailing the positive effects that have come from reading their often challenged books.
Read the article to see all of the responses, but some repeating themes are that young people feel less isolated, feel more connected to friends or family that may be facing challenges, are able to find the strength to remove themselves from harmful situations, and to begin to find a sense of self-acceptance.
While well-meaning (hopefully) adults may challenge books that feature tough issues like self-harm, abuse, and addiction, the young people that read these books are generally all too aware of these same issues already. Reading these books can help them not only work through and make sense of the issues, but show that they aren’t the only ones dealing with them.
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