Category Archives: Tech

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Do you need some pep? Check out these library advocacy videos!

Videos can be a great way to demonstrate your services, and to advocate for your library!  Check out these library videos, to see what kinds of things other libraries are trying.

Does your library make videos? Would you like to?? At CMLE Headquarters, we want to encourage video creation and sharing, so tell us about your work!

2016 Livonia Public Library Summer Reading Program … Parkour!

“Do you need a book recommendation? Have you ever seen a librarian stunt double? Check out our 2016 Livonia Library Summer Reading video featuring Phoenix Freerunning Academy and our very limber librarians. Jump into action on June 4, 2016 by grabbing a reading log at any of the Livonia Public Libraries! Visit our website for more info: http://livoniapubliclibrary.org. And for the Children’s summer reading log, visit our Children’s Programs page: http://livoniapubliclibrary.org/kids/…. Library Parkour!”

Save the Troy Library “Adventures In Reverse Psychology”

“The city of Troy, Michigan was facing a budget shortfall, and was considering closing the Troy Public Library for lack of funds. Even though the necessary revenues could be raised through a miniscule tax increase, powerful anti-tax groups in the area were organized against it. A vote was scheduled amongst the city’s residents, to shut the library or accept the tax increase, and Leo Burnett Detroit decided to support the library by creating a reverse psychology campaign. Yard signs began appearing that read: “Vote to Close Troy Library on August 2nd – Book Burning Party on August 5th.” No one wants to be a part of a town that burns books, and the outraged citizens of Troy pushed back against the “idiotic book burners” and ultimately supported the tax increase, thus ensuring the library’s survival.”

 

 

A Vision Shared: School Board/District Planning for

School Library Advocacy

 

“This short film provides pointers for creating a school board/district wide vision statement for school libraries and emphasizes the importance of advocating for school libraries.”

Librarians Do Gaga

“Students and faculty from the University of Washington’s Information School get their groove on.”

 

Librarian Rhapsody- Shoalhaven Library Staff

This is the most unusual annual report from a library that I’ve ever seen – but combining telling their community about the things they have been doing over the past year with a strong message advocating for the library is a great touch! (Keep watching to the end for the final couple of sentences!)

Academic, Check this out:, General, Public, Resources, School Media Specialist, Special, Tech

Library Vending machines

books-1614215_1280
More access to library materials!

Libraries are places of information and technology, so it makes sense to use technology to connect patrons with information! That’s exactly what library vending machines aim to do. The idea may sound a little silly, but the machines may be an answer to some libraries that lack the necessary staff numbers to distribute books and laptops.

Across the country, communities are giving this a try! Read about how Ohio’s Worthington Community Center has a vending machine where library patrons can check out books, music, and movies. The library wanted to be able to bring their materials out into the community to better serve patrons.

Closer to home, we have a few locations that feature library vending! Check out these lockers at the Hugo Library Express. And the Anoka County Library on the Go has a vending machine! Watch their video below:

For more information, you can visit this site about laptop vending, or this one about book vending. And this site gets more in-depth about the value of library material lockers!

Do any of our CMLE member libraries have machines similar to these? Send us a picture, we would love to see them!

 

Check this out:, CMLE, General, Tech

CMLE is dropping Travel Bugs!

geocaching
Caching: a game, an exploration, and adventure! And a way to talk about libraries!!

If you have not already read our blog on Geocaching in the Library, you may want to go back and do a quick review.

To encourage people to get outside and explore, and to hear about the value of libraries from all kinds of sources (it is Advocacy month here at CMLE, after all!), we created five Travel Bugs. We are starting to drop these in geocaches around the area, and have instructions for finders to take them to libraries and move them along.

When a cacher finds one of our travel bugs, they will be taken to the Travel Bug page on our website. Here you can get some quick info about CMLE, and get links to all five of our Travel Bugs (TBs). You can click on each one, and then click (top right hand corner) to follow the TB and get notifications when it moves. This can be fun if the TB gets to visit libraries, as requested; and you can see all the different places the TBs go! (In a previous travel bug project I did to highlight libraries along the Lewis and Clark Trail, TBs I dropped along the way ended up going all over the world!!)

take-me-to-your-library-travel-bug-at-hermione-grangers-book-trading-cache

Our first TB has been dropped! It is called Take Me To Your Library; and it could not be in a better cache: Hermione Granger’s book trading cache. This cache has books available to trade -just the thing to warm the heart of any library fan! I was very excited to find this in a really beautiful part outside Eau Claire, Wisconsin. The sun was just starting to go down, my phone’s battery was starting to die; and just as I was about to give up, a deer was standing on the path in front of me! I stopped where I was and looked over to the left – and there was the cache! It was a great find, and I was very excited to drop our first TB there.

Are you in the area? Go find this one!! You can move it along to another cache, and we want to hear all about it. Or just click on the link to follow its adventures!

Do you cache?? Does your library have a cache, or any Travel Bugs??? We want to hear from you! We will have more Travel Bug updates, as ours get dropped and head out for library-related adventures and fun!

 

Check this out:, General, Resources, School Media Specialist, Tech

AASL Recommended App: STEM: Map of Life

map_of_life_0In June 2016, the American Association of School Librarians (AASL) announced their 25 Best Apps for Teaching and Learning. The apps encourage qualities such as innovation and active participation, and are user-friendly.

The app Map of Life allows users to discover, identify, and record biodiversity from all over the world. Students are able to contribute to the map by recording sightings. The app features many different categories of species, including trees, mammals, birds, fish, and more. Users can learn about characteristics and habitats, with the goal to help worldwide conservation efforts. This app would be a good addition to a science field trip, in order to record and identify plants and animals.

Cost: Free
Level: Middle and High School
Platforms: iOS and Android

Read about this teacher’s experience using the app in her classroom, then watch this short video from the Florida Museum of Natural History  that describes how to use and learn from the app:

Academic, Check this out:, CMLE, General, Public, School Media Specialist, Special, Tech

Geocaching in the library!

geocaching
Geocaches are everywhere!

Do you cache?

You might blink a couple of times if a patron asked you this question! But we want you to be about to confidently say “Yes! Have you found our library’s cache??”

Geocaching is a popular activity for people of all ages, all tech abilities, and located literally anywhere you could go. It is done at bus stops, at highway rest areas, in parks, at historic sites and in junkyards, downtown and in the middle of the woods, with friends or alone. An astronaut cached on the International Space Station!

But what is it?

“Geocaching is a real-world, outdoor treasure hunting game using GPS-enabled devices. Participants navigate to a specific set of GPS coordinates and then attempt to find the geocache (container) hidden at that location.”  It sounds easy. Sometimes it is. And sometimes all you get is the fun of hunting for things. And that is the real attraction of caching: the chance to look around for things – either right in your own neighborhood or as you travel to new places! Finding things that others have hidden for you lets you participate in a special community, one in which Muggles have no idea what is happening right under their noses. You discover new places, find new people, and have fun – a great combination. Think Pokemon Go, but more real-world. Fewer monsters, less fighting – more focus on finding things.

Libraries are natural spots for caching, and work well with people who may want to go out to cache to explore the community. Caching involves identifying a specific piece of information (the cache), then hunting it down. Sound familiar? It’s pretty similar to the work we do in hunting down information online or finding books for people! Library people are natural cachers; we know how to be tenacious and to keep hunting for that one thing we need out of a whole environment of other things. And providing caches in our library is a great way to encourage people to visit us!

And many libraries are already getting in on this action. Does your library have a cache? Would you like to?? Read through the instructions here, scrolling down to read Hiding Geocaches.

You can also participate by sharing Travel Bugs! “A Travel Bug is a Trackable that moves from place to place, picking up stories along the way. Here you can add your own story, or live vicariously through each Bug’s adventures.” What kinds of adventures could your travel bug have?? SO many!!

CMLE is setting up some library Travel Bugs. You can follow the adventures of our Travel bugs, and get updates as they move around to exciting new locations; and we will update you as they make their way around to different libraries. Set up a cache in your library, so our Travel Bugs can come visit you! Click on these links to see the Travel Bug individual pages – complete with photos of CMLE Office Bear Clarence holding each.

Let’s watch some library caching in action!

  • The Geocaching Vlogger is out having fun near Seattle at a geocaching event, and finds a library geocache
  • And the Geocaching Vlogger spends time looking for another library cache, which is requiring use of the library resources! (All our patrons should be this excited about coming to the library!!)

Look through these resources for some information about library caching:

  • The Other Wikipedia: A Geocache in The Library “In 2013, staff created a geocache to be hidden within the Beatley Central Library. Starting at the Information Desk, a series of clues guides players through various collections until they reach the actual geocache. Staff creatively employed the Dewey Decimal System to navigate geocachers from one clue to the next.”
  • Libraries “Cache” in on Geocaching Treasure Hunts “As physical collections shrink in response to the digital revolution, most libraries are looking for ways to keep the turnstile spinning. In central New York near Syracuse, Liverpool Public Library (LPL) found one answer this past spring in the call of the wild, namely, the growing geocaching craze.”
  • Hide and seek in the library: Geocaching as an educational and outreach tool  A slideshow from Andrew Spencer at the Macquarie University Library
  • NLD ideas: Let a library geocache help in the hunt for new visitors “It’s a perpetual problem when promoting libraries: how to avoid preaching to the converted and inspire people who’d never normally come through the doors to make their first visit. Libraries as far apart as Cornwall and Norfolk, Glamorgan and Ayrshire have all found an innovative answer – set a library geocache.”

Does your library have a geocache? Tell us all about it! We would love to feature you and your library in an upcoming story!