In 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 Homes allows students to travel around the globe and take interactive tours of different traditional homes. They can learn about living in a Brooklyn brownstone, Yemeni tower house, Mongolian ger (yurt), and Guatemalan adobe. Students learn about daily activities in other cultures and see how electricity and water is directed in each building. The app is available in over 50 languages and has a guide for parents that includes questions to help encourage learning.
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.
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!
In case you are looking for some travel inspiration, or just want to feast your eyes on some beautiful architecture, check out this article from the BookBub blog that highlights 32 of the world’s most beautiful libraries. The list is diverse with the libraries that are included, with designs that range from Baroque to extremely modern. It’s interesting to see the various influences that have impacted the libraries’ designs – many are theological, some have been influenced by nature, or the history of their location. In the article, each photo features a short description that discusses the uniqueness of each library. Here are some samples:
The very first library profiled is the Abbey Library of St. Gall in Switzerland. It’s a World Heritage site and also contains the earliest known architectural plan, written on parchment!
The impressive Kansas City Central Library in Missouri is number thirteen on the list. It’s easy to tell the function of the building from the outside, since one of the walls features huge paintings of the spines of 22 different books! Each book is twenty-five feet high and nine feet wide.
Take a look at the Tianyi Pavilion Library in China at number twenty-seven on the list. It’s the oldest private library in Asia! The tranquility of the location is very obvious. The library is next to a lake and surrounded by gardens.
It’s so hard to choose a favorite, but I think the libraries in Austria are especially breathtaking. Which one(s) would you like to visit in person?
Ready to think outside the box about a way to help both your library and the community? If you are a public or academic library, this idea could be for you!
The U.S. State Department is looking to add to their growing network of passport acceptance facilities. A passport acceptance facility is just like it sounds – “a public sector office that is designated to accept passport applications.” The facility then sends the applications to the State Department, who handle the processing and issuing of the passports.
There are definitely benefits to becoming one of these acceptance facilities. Most libraries operate on a strict budget, and by becoming a passport acceptance facility, your library would get to keep the $25 Execution Fee that comes with each passport. That would add up quickly. Plus, you would get an increase of people coming to your library! And while they are there to get their passport, why not use a computer or check out a book? There’s also the consideration that many libraries have more inclusive hours of operation than the traditional passport acceptance facility, the post office. People may be more able to process their paperwork by visiting the library instead.
Planning a trip this summer? If you like books, this article will share with you several unique literary spots not to be missed, including libraries, bookstores, and architecture!
These 12 spots were found on Google Maps so you can get both the address and an idea of the neighborhood they are in, to ensure you can locate them easily should you ever be in the area.
Check out the book benches in Istanbul, which are spread throughout the city and include the works of 18 famous Turkish writers. Or, shop for books in a castle! Hay Castle in the U.K. features an open-air bookshop.
Have you traveled somewhere with a literary influence? We want to hear about it! Let us know in the comments below.
Image credit: http://unsplash.com/(Bertrand Zuchuat) licensed under CC0 1.0
Partnering with libraries for visioning, advocating, and educating
In 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.
