Tag Archives: materials

Guest Blogger, Materials

Lisa Lindbloom Extended Mini Grant

This is a guest post from Lisa Lindbloom in the media center at Sartell Middle School. Find out more about our Extended Mini Grant Program.

Thank you CMLE for supporting Sartell Middle School Students! We are so excited to see the books flying off the shelf with the return of students to our building.

The diverse books that were purchased over the summer have inspired our students to venture out and read about other cultures, perspectives and experiences from new authors that have not been on our shelf before.  

Our students are already beginning to request the new books to be held for them and the conversations around literature have been great!

One of our favorite student reactions so far has been “Yes, I have been wanting to read this book! When did we get it?” The students’ excitement has been contagious!

Resources

Arlington Heights library patron returns album 40 years late

Vinyl record LP 10inch
We all know that patrons sometimes return materials late. Sometimes they just forget things, sometimes they lose items, and sometimes they are so in love with our stuff that they just can’t bring themselves to return it.

Things happen.

So we can all rejoice when a library gets a long-lost item returned; and in this library they handed the situation very well!

(By Eileen O. Daday, you can read the whole article here)

“Nearly 40 years have passed since a vinyl record album by experimental musician Harry Partch was “borrowed” from the Arlington Heights Memorial Library. On Thursday, it returned and library officials accepted it with no questions asked.

“We understand things happen,” said Executive Director Jason Kuhl. “We try to be welcoming and want people to know there’s not some thousand-dollar fine waiting for them.

“We look at returns on a case-by-case basis,” he added. “If patrons have something like this, we encourage them to bring it back. We’re always willing to work with customers.”

In this case, the patron was Arlington Heights native Bill Paige, who said he wanted to come clean and return the collectible to its rightful place.

“It’s an artifact and in mint condition. I wanted to clear the slate,” said Paige, a lifelong music buff, who worked as a writer in the entertainment industry before serving as communications director of Oakton Community College in Des Plaines. He retired in 2010 to Austin, Texas. Continue reading Arlington Heights library patron returns album 40 years late →

Materials, Resources

Free Is Good: Open educational resources are free digital materials

Open Access PLoS

From Edutopia,  By Bethany Rayl

Open educational resources (OER) are found in the public domain and can be used for free for teaching, learning, research, and other educational purposes. These materials can be retained, reused, revised, remixed, and redistributed. These “5R permissions” of OER allow you to not only access the materials and resources free of charge, but also to make them even better. Sounds good, right? But what’s really out there, and why should you use these resources?

There are several examples of OER available, including image and audio resources, books in the public domain, video and audio lectures, interactive simulations, game-based learning programs, lesson plans, textbooks, online course curricula, professional learning programs, and online learning platforms. Continue reading Free Is Good: Open educational resources are free digital materials →

Materials

From Fine Art to Fishing Poles, the Most Surprising Things Libraries Are Lending Now

We are interested in this, here at CMLE HQ! Check out our podcast on unusual materials.

From Atlas Obscura:

“When the writer Deborah Fallows toured smaller and midsize communities in the United States in 2016, she made sure to make the same stop in every city and town: the local public library. Libraries were never just plain old book-lenders, she learned, and they certainly aren’t now. Most provide residents with internet access, educational opportunities, and even refuge during times of meteorological or civic crisis. They use their archives to hold onto local history, and their programming and decor to reflect a vision of the future.

A town or city’s Main Street or Chamber of Commerce reveals its body politic, writes Fallows, but “the visit to the public library reveal[s] its heart and soul.” These days, many of these hearts and souls are full of unexpected stuff—including stuff that, if you want, you can take home with you for a few weeks. In the spirit of civic introspection, here are some of America’s most surprising current circulating collections, from art to umbrellas.”

Read the rest of this article!

Books, Resources

Six thousand digitized kid’s books are available to you!

5 Little PIgs

Check out this material from Open Culture!

“We can learn much about how a historical period viewed the abilities of its children by studying its children’s literature. Occupying a space somewhere between the purely didactic and the nonsensical, most children’s books published in the past few hundred years have attempted to find a line between the two poles, seeking a balance between entertainment and instruction. However, that line seems to move closer to one pole or another depending on the prevailing cultural sentiments of the time. And the very fact that children’s books were hardly published at all before the early 18th century tells us a lot about when and how modern ideas of childhood as a separate category of existence began….

Where the boundaries for kids’ literature had once been narrowly fixed by Latin grammar books and Pilgrim’s Progress, by the end of the 19th century, the influence of science fiction like Jules Verne’s, and of popular supernatural tales and poems, prepared the ground for comic books, YA dystopias, magician fiction, and dozens of other children’s literature genres we now take for granted, or—in increasingly large numbers—we buy to read for ourselves. Enter the Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature here, where you can browse several categories, search for subjects, authors, titles, etc, see full-screen, zoomable images of book covers, download XML versions, and read all of the over 6,000 books in the collection with comfortable reader views. Find more classics in our collection, 800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kindle & Other Devices.”

(Read the rest of this article by clicking here!)