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.
July is National Blueberry Month!
Other things to celebrate in July. . .
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.”
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
I love newsletters, and I love reading through them in my email! One of my favorites is a pretty bare-bones setup, called Data is Plural.
(As a researcher, it always make me chuckle, because this is a standard way new grad students can set themselves apart from non-researchers by pretentiously saying “Actually, it’s ‘data are’ not ‘data is’ to show you know what you are doing. You need a few pretentious tools when you are a scared, brand-new researcher!)
This weekly newsletter is produced by Jeremy Singer-Vine. He gathers together all kinds of interesting databases, each filled with information that would be very useful to you – sometime, in some situation. There is always something fun to browse, and I enjoy just looking at things that I never knew were being collected!
This is a link to one week of the newsletter, with these topics and a link to sign up for it yourself:
Do you read these as a kid? My brother and I were VERY into these books! I had a bunch of them, and read a lot at the library; but have not looked at them in many years now.
I had no idea people were mapping the books and helping other enjoy all kinds of different adventures!
“For years, fans have been creating visualizations of the forking structures of “Choose Your Own Adventure” books. Often, they’re interested in the types of outcomes at the end of each path. One map labels each ending as “new life, return home, or death,” and another separates them into “cliffhanger, solution, or death.” Christian Swinehart’s extensive graphical analysis of the books labels the endings as “great, favorable, mediocre, disappointing, or catastrophic.””
Read through this entire article to get more information, and to see all the very cool charts included!
