Tag Archives: Special Library

A visit to the St. Cloud Hospital library!

Angie and I are on a mission to visit all our CMLE member libraries – and we are making some great progress! This week we were invited to visit the library at the St. Cloud Hospital, by librarian Susan Schleper. We are sharing all these library visits with you, our members (and others!), to help everyone see the diversity of service we are providing across the CMLE system. And we want you to know what is going on in different libraries, so you feel invited to contact each other to talk about partnerships or sharing ideas for great service! Many of you are solo librarians, or working with others who are not doing the same kinds of things you do – but someone else in the system probably does it or wants to learn more about it. So: read, be awed by all we do here in the CMLE area, and reach out to each other! (And us! At Headquarters we like to partner too!!)

popular-collection
A nice place to sit, some popular fiction on the shelves – a great place to visit if you are in the hospital!

Most visitors to the hospital library are probably not as enthusiastic as we were to be there – but look at this location! If you are in the hospital as a patient or visitor – drop by to look at their materials. It can be very helpful to have a spot to just take a break; and the library can be that space. (I managed to keep my hands off their copy of the Hunger Games. But it was a close thing! Visiting libraries and NOT reading their books is really hard for a book-loving librarian!)

reference-desk
Reference desk

Continue reading A visit to the St. Cloud Hospital library!

Special librarians: A button museum!

PinbuttonWell, this is an interesting job!

Christy Karpinski is the digital librarian and museum manager at Busy Beaver’s Button Museum in Chicago, IL. As we enter the political season, we see all of the candidate’s buttons prominently displayed. Christy has the unique job of archiving all of those individual buttons. As the Button Museum and also its online presence grew, Christy transitioned into her current position.

The Button Museum was “created to show how people commemorated noteworthy times in their lives by creating and collecting these wearable mementos. The words, artwork, printing style, color, and size were the final result of a vision they wanted to communicate or be a part of,” according to Joel and Christen Carter, the brother/sister button team. The museum now has 9,000 different pinback buttons on display.

American Libraries magazine article on Christy

Image credit: http://tinyurl.com/zrxw7dk, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0

Prison libraries: A place to learn, a place to read, a place to learn to read.

Uncertain CrossingIn a recent post on CILIP by ex-prisoner Jonathan Robinson, the prison library gets some credit where credit is due. Being a part of the “Special Library” contingency, prison libraries are often the forgotten library in the forgotten type of libraries. But Mr. Robinson is able to give them a small amount of recognition in his post.

“Prison librarians were put on this earth to rehabilitate their customers,” he says. They have customers who may belong there but crave and need the services and materials that prison libraries can only offer. “Inhabitants of prisons… find the library the one place that vaguely resembles life on the outside.”

In the CMLE region, we have two prison libraries. The Minnesota Correctional Facility in St. Cloud which is staffed by Teri Hams, and the Minnesota Correctional Facility in Rush City which is staffed by Jonathan Chapman. We applaud them and their work to make a difference in the lives of prisoners, their families, and the community.

Read the full post now and learn more about prison libraries.

Image credit: http://tinyurl.com/pa2wv2g, licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0