Tag Archives: Library

Academic, General, Public, School Media Specialist, Special

Community Grants from Walmart

walmart-foundation

Does your library have an idea for a program or service you could set up to benefit your community? Walmart might be able to help!

Through their Community Grant Program, the Walmart Foundation provides funds to nonprofit and government organizations serving communities. “Walmart and the Walmart Foundation have identified four core areas of giving: Hunger Relief & Healthy Eating, Sustainability, Women’s Economic Empowerment, and Opportunity.”

The guidelines are here; so read through them to see if your idea might fit into their funding. The deadline for this round of grants is December  31, 2016; but if your idea is more suitable for setting up later, this is an annual program.

They have set up an FAQ section here, and reading through these might give you some ideas.

CMLE Libraries: Do you want to discuss some grant ideas? Want to get some help in writing your application, or a second set of eyes? Email or call us, and we will be happy to help out on your application material!

 

Academic, General, Public, School Media Specialist, Special

New Minnesota Library CE Calendar

mn_lib_wordmark_color_png.png-image2993-280There is a new statewide Library Continuing Education (CE) Calendar sponsored by the seven Minnesota Multitype Library Systems. Its goal is to make it easy for library staff seeking CE opportunities & for planners of MN events to see what is already scheduled. Events on the calendar are open to all staff, although there may be some registration restrictions. Libraries & systems are invited to submit library CE opportunities to the calendar at calendar@mnlibs.info. Comments on the calendar are welcome at that address, too.
Academic, General, Public, School Media Specialist, Special

Does your library have a public identity?

UntitledEven librarians can take tactics and ideas from politics. Recently, Rachel Korman wrote about the idea of “surfacing” on the EveryLibrary blog. “Surfacing is when a candidate emerges into the public consciousness and creates a public identity for themselves.” Libraries are already in the public consciousness you might say, but there are always special instances when properly increasing your public identity can help. That’s what the Findlay-Hancock County Public Library of Ohio ran into when they had a 0.5 levy renewal on a ballot. Asking for money on a ballot, whether for a public library or public school, can be a difficult task. That’s where surfacing comes in! Here are the steps:

Step 1: “Demonstrating candidates’ fitness for office” – communicate your plan
Step 2: “Initiating political rituals” – rallies or campaign events
Step 3: “Providing the public opportunities to learn about the candidates” – get out of the library
Step 4: “Developing voter expectations…” – what does the library do?
Step 5: “Determining main campaign issues” – create and follow a plan
Step 6: “Separating frontrunners from the rest of the candidates” – keep positive perceptions
Step 7: “Establishing candidate-media relationships” – get your voice heard

Read more about surfacing here. Maybe you can apply it to your next library campaign or just increasing your library’s footprint in the community.

Image Credit: http://tinyurl.com/mab6pc4, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
General, Public

7 Lucky Benefits of Libraries

We all have a reason to love libraries – the smell of the books, the quietness of the library, the organization of the stacks. . .  In her post, Jess Simpson of Bustle give us 7 Things Only Kids Who Practically Grew Up in a Library Can Understand.  One of the points?  Everyone benefits when knowledge is free and easy!  The public library provides a world of knowledge on nearly every subject you can think of – and it’s free for anyone and everyone.  Be sure to check out the other six on the list!

Academic, General, Public, School Media Specialist, Special

Library As Idea Incubator?

Valerie EverettThomas Frey, famous futurist,  presented recently for the American Library Association at an event at the  Library of Congress about the Future of Libraries. Nothing like a futurist to get the creative juices flowing, and I found his blog post about library as “liquid network”, a breeding ground for future ideas, to be fascinating. I don’t have the logistics figured out, but as all types of librarians grapple with the role of the library in the future, this idea is novel. I think many of us can agree that libraries will certainly not be about warehousing books (they already are not).

Did you know that the Library of Congress has been archiving Twitter since 2010 and has more than 600 billion tweets to date? That seems a bit extreme, but what if libraries provided a “stable storehouse” of space  to gather creative ideas? And as Frey says, “It’s far less about where ideas come from and far more about where they go as they enter into our emerging ‘liquid networks’ ecosystem.” And as Frey points out, as we allow others to see cool ideas, it could spark new epiphanies otherwise never imagined! This idea would squarely position the library as catalyst in these liquid networks. What do you think, could it work?

See Thomas Frey’s post…..The Future Library–A Liquid Network for Ideas to read in deeper detail.

Image: Some rights reserved by Valerie Everett