Tag Archives: CMLE Scholarship

Conference, Guest Blogger

CMLE Scholarship: MLA 2017

This guest post was written by Violet Fox, Metadata Librarian at the College of St. Benedict/St. John’s University.

The theme for the 2017 Minnesota Library Association’s Annual Conference was “Radical Librarianship,” and I couldn’t have been more excited! I was excited to hear from library workers not only about the great things that libraries do for our users, but also how we as a profession should strive to recognize and address our shortcomings.

I was delighted to be able to present alongside some of my favorite library folks: Hannah Buckland (Leech Lake Tribal College), Tina Gross (St. Cloud State University), and Jessica Schomberg (Minnesota State University, Mankato). In our session, we talked about how centralization in cataloging often prevents libraries from responding flexibly to the needs of their users, and encouraged all librarians to argue for the value of local control in our standards and vocabularies in order to provide respectful and responsive metadata.

A number of MLA 2017 presentations gave me ample material to reflect on. Standouts included Safiya Umoja Noble’s session on how increasing reliance on opaque algorithms results in upholding societal inequity and oppression, as well as an interesting session from librarians at Dakota County Library (Christie Schultz and Lori Veldhuis) on their valuable project to make their world language collection more accessible and attractive to patrons.

Alhough I don’t do usability testing or user surveying in my job, the most exciting session I attended was “UX is Social Change: the Feminist Impact of User Experience Work” by librarians at Metropolitan State University (Christine Larson, Jennifer DeJonghe) and Hennepin County Library (Amy Luedtke, Tony Hirt). The presenters talked about how they use feminist principles within their work, in part by centering patron experiences and recognizing that patrons have knowledge and experience that we don’t. They also discussed their efforts to recruit UX participants intentionally, and acknowledged that it can be uncomfortable to have one’s design ideas critiqued. I very much appreciated the presenters’ unapologetic embrace of “disciplined empathy” in their work, and their presentation encouraged me to find ways to do the same in my own day-to-day work.

I’m grateful for CMLE’s support to attend MLA 2017 and I’d like to encourage Minnesota library colleagues to attend and present at next year’s conference!

Do you want to attend a conference or take part in some other professional development? Apply for a scholarship from CMLE today!

Conference, Guest Blogger, Services

CMLE Scholarship: Digipalooza!


This is a guest post written by Sarah Hawkins, Resource Librarian at East Central Regional Library Cambridge. Do you need a scholarship to attend a conference? Check out our Scholarships page!

In early August, I attended the OverDrive Digipalooza Conference in Cleveland, Ohio.  It was an exciting conference, because it managed to be both inspiring and future-focused and practical and applicable to current workflows, in equal measure. OverDrive staff and presenters were energetic, innovative, and happy to share their love of literacy, libraries, OverDrive, and Cleveland with all attendees.

A common theme throughout the conference was that building digital collections is not all about selection, but equally about what we do with what we select and the mantra: if you build it, they will come. The most immediate takeaway that I applied to my workflow immediately as a result was a hack shared by Mike Hawkins from Sno-Isle Libraries for turning OverDrive Resource Center lists into Curated Collections.  Curated collections help keep your OverDrive front page fresh, which in turn keeps your users coming back and happy.   Any trick to simplify this process and encourage librarians to create Curated Collections more frequently is a win!

The hack:  Curate from an OverDrive Recommended List

OverDrive provides a collection of lists curated by their Collection Development librarians in OverDrive Resource Center. Any of these lists can be converted to curation mode, but it requires a hack of the URL.

  1. Find and click on a list in OverDrive Resource Center that you would like to curate on your OverDrive site.
  2. Select the OneCopyOneUserAndMeteredAccess portion of the URL in the address bar.
  3. Replace OneCopyOneUserAndMeteredAccess with Curate in the address bar and hit Enter.
  4. From there the list can be curated as outlined in the How To Create a Curated Collection instructions.  

Other curation tips include: change the display settings to “Show all, but available first” so that the first items your users see are immediately available for checkout and developing collections around community events. Ultimately, the goal is to have patrons leave our websites having borrowed something.  Happy customers also leads to happy librarians!

The inspirational side of the coin included reflecting on Cuyahoga County Public Library’s mission: reading, lifelong learning, and community.  If only all of our mission statements were as succinct! Looking towards the future also included the OverDrive project roadmap with the new Libby app and forthcoming features (including getting a library card instantly in the app), magazines soon being available in OverDrive, the availability of the cost per circ model, and OverDrive’s new status as a Certified B Corp.  

Other great information included collection development, social media marketing, train the trainer, using data, outreach, and Reader’s Advisory. Plus, we were lucky enough to see a live recording of the Professional Book Nerds podcast with author Kelly Corrigan.  The video is on OverDrive’s Facebook page; I highly recommend you check it out.

At the end of the conference, I left feeling inspired to get back to work and do my part in Creating Reading Happiness!

Digipalooza fun fact: 57% of people said that the place they listen to audiobooks most is relaxing at home.

Graphic Recordings from the Sessions:

Resources

CMLE Resources: Take advantage of CMLE Scholarships!

Each week, we will draw your attention to one of the many resources available to you from CMLE Headquarters. Our mission is to help build connections between members, across all types of libraries. We exist to share information across libraries (and archives, and museums, and history centers) – and we are always looking for more ways to make that happen!

One of the ways in which we encourage creating connections is by offering scholarships for professional development opportunities. And there are so many options out there for library people! We want to make sure all of our members get a chance to participate, whether it’s taking a webinar or attending a conference. Since we know money is often tight in libraries, CMLE has scholarships available to help fund your continuing learning and professional programs! And starting this year, you can apply for up to $300 to help with your expenses!

Some quick guidelines:

  1. You can apply for up to $300 in each CMLE fiscal year (July 1 – June 30).
  2. We need the application before the event, to approve it.
  3. You must be an employee or Board member of a CMLE member library. Preference will be given to first-time scholarship requests.

Find the rest of the guidelines here, along with the FY18 CMLE Scholarship Application.

If you are looking for professional development opportunities, make sure to keep an eye on our Continuing Education calendar which we update frequently! Or check out sites like TIES, ALA’s webinars, Library Juice, AASL’s eAcademy, and ACRL’s online learning page.

CMLE, Conference, Guest Blogger

CMLE Scholarship Recipients from FY17!

We are happy to celebrate the recipients of CMLE Scholarships from Fiscal Year 2017! We are so glad they took advantage of our scholarship program in order to attend several different conferences, which you can read about from the links below.

If you are planning on doing some professional development next year by attending conferences or taking part in continuing education, we invite you to apply for a CMLE Scholarship! More information can be found here. If you are looking for some Continuing Education opportunities, make sure to check out our Google Calendar.

Read about our CMLE Scholarship recipients from Fiscal Year 2017 below:

As we near the end of this fiscal year, we encourage you to think ahead to Continuing Education opportunities for next year, and to keep CMLE scholarships in mind to help with the financial aspect of your professional growth!

CMLE, Conference, Guest Blogger

CMLE Scholarship: Annual Minitex Interlibrary Loan Conference

Reflection on 26th Annual Minitex Interlibrary Loan Conference
Mary Ramacher
Access Department – ILL
SCSU Library

As a result of attending this event, can you identify and explain a few things you can use/apply to your work or practice?

Several of the things I took away from the Keynote speaker were:

  • That the library needs to not just be welcoming to employees but that it should look welcoming when you first enter the building
  • To say “yes, and” to show that you understand what someone is saying instead of “no, but” when we can’t do exactly what the patron is asking.
  • An analysis of personality styles.

Our library had a very ‘sterile’ atmosphere when you first enter the building and a few years ago we put in an electric fireplace and some comfortable seating in the front. It is one of the busiest areas of the library now, which proves the idea of being welcoming. I am looking forward to trying the more positive approach of using ‘yes and’ as opposed to ‘no but’ when helping my patrons. The personality types analysis will be very helpful too when dealing with difficult personalities.

The session on statistics by the Minitex Director was very interesting too. Our library web page will need some work so that its format adjusts to any type of device for ease of use.  She also talked about 18-24 year olds reporting ‘digital fatigue’ so our idea that students want everything electronically will need to be reevaluated.

We were also informed of some improvements to WorldShare that I will be using immediately upon returning to work in Interlibrary Loan.

Mary Ramacher

320-308-2085

Access Department – ILL

SCSU Library