Nominations for the 28th Annual Minnesota Book Awards are open now through December 4, 2015! Visit the nomination page for more information or to nominate your favorite book of 2015! Keep in mind that the book must be written by a Minnesota resident, published in 2015, and fit into one of eight categories: Children’s Literature, General Nonfiction, Genre Fiction, Memoir & Creative Nonfiction, Minnesota, Novel & Short Story, Poetry, and Young People’s Literature.
Tag Archives: Update
Retirements or Staffing Changes?
This is the time of year we ask for your help in identifying retirements or staffing changes that will happen at the end of this academic year. Unfortunately, if we are not made aware of these changes, we often have no way of telling that we need to make contact with new recruits in the Fall. Sometimes locations simply fall off of our radar as a result of these communication breakdowns. Needless to say, we also want to give recognition to proud retirees too! They have worked hard and deserve some recognition before the end of the year. Thanks in advance for any information you can provide about changes in your setting or in other settings. Once you give us the tip, we are happy to track down the details! Send email to admin@cmle.org.
P.S. We would be happy to shine the light on other staff accomplishments too, so don’t be shy about sharing those too. Did someone get promoted or receive a special award? Use the same email address, use subject line Staff Accomplishments. We will compile and share through our communication streams soon.
Image credit: http://tinyurl.com/lah599f, licensed under CC BY 2.0
CMLE Featured Service: Shadowing
Walk alongside another librarian for a day to see how alike or different your worlds are!
The CMLE shadowing service is relatively new, but promises lots of potential in Central Minnesota. CMLE staff pay attention to the details of academic, public, school and special libraries in 319 locations in 12 counties. Through our work in the field, our communications to library staff, and our use of tools like our Quick Question Polls, we strive to have a good grasp on the library landscape in Central MN. Then, by using that knowledge, our staff can play matchmaker and connect you to a library setting other than your own. We call this activity shadowing.
Who could benefit from a CMLE shadowing experience?
- Many librarians wonder wistfully whether they made the right decision back in library school about what type of librarian they wanted to become. Maybe shadowing can provide clarity without the professional risk of changing jobs!
- Are you a para running a school media center, wondering if you should pursue a degree? Particularly in K-12 schools, the experience of media specialists can be quite different, depending on whether the school is moving into Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) or One-to-One Initiatives (1:1). CMLE staff know which schools are in these stages of transition and can provide you with the right fit.
- Are you an academic librarian trying to anticipate how the high school student coming out of a BYOD or 1:1 school might approach a college experience differently? Will there be impact on how you provide an academic library or teaching experience?
- Are you a high school media specialist feeling beyond stretched as you single handedly run the media center and teach classes? Are you wondering if a public or academic library might be a better fit for you?
- Are you a special librarian, working fairly solo (often not feeling so special), and wondering if it might be time for a larger setting and a team of people with whom you can work?
If any of these scenarios sound like you, our shadowing program may be a good option for you. Or, maybe you are simply a curious person, willing and anxious to understand a bigger library world….that is ok too.
If you are interested in setting up a shadowing experience, please make contact with me to sort out the details. I will help you with connections and logistics.
MEMO 2013 Conference Note
Were you unable to attend the recent MEMO Conference in St. Cloud? Did you attend the conference but upon returning to work you were completely buried as a result of taking time off to invest in yourself? Perhaps you cannot even find those notes you took during the conference. No matter what your story is, Michelle Kiley and I attended the conference in order to report back some of the things we learned, and to help you feel more professionally connected too. With that in mind, some conference resources you may find interesting and helpful include:
Joyce Valenza’s keynote presentation
Twitter hash tag for the conference was: #mnmemo. Many MEMO colleagues were tweeting during the conference and often embed links that may not be made available anywhere else, so check it out!
Tip: Through social media I often find out the Twitter hash tag for national conferences I am unable to attend. Then when I go into my Twitter account, I do a search for the hash tag to view conference content. Sometimes, even the keynotes are available in this way. Try it out!
From the Director
This fiscal year concludes on June 30, 2013, and it has been a whirlwind of change and transitions in Central MN Libraries Exchange (CMLE)! It’s good to look back over the year, while also looking forward to next year and exciting new possibilities! I’ve included a few highlights as a warm up to writing year-end reports soon:
- Beginning last July, CMLE vowed to Refocus, Retool, and Evolve at the conclusion of its strategic planning process. The Governing Board helped us make some hard decisions. The most significant one was the sunsetting of our physical interlibrary loan service after a 10 year downward spiral in usage. Costs for providing the service have not decreased, so the cost/benefit analysis spoke loudly to all involved. We continue to assist users of that service in finding alternate ways to order interlibrary loans.
- The Board got even more excited about the results of an opportunity analysis for CMLE, some of which you experienced this year.
- Beginning in September, we replaced our quarterly newsletter and began to use our weekly communication streams including our Weekly Review email messages, our blog posts, Facebook and Twitter. The first month we made this change, we went from 62 hits on our blog to 584! News on the street was that our users loved this change and we loved the new freedom and immediacy that a blogging platform provided to us. By January, we more than doubled our September blog hits at 1,506!
- We offered two popular e-book events in the fall; one for academics, one for K-12 media personnel. We also continued our Bridging Information Literacy Across Libraries initiative work, including a college student survey to 400 students, and beginning development of a video.
- Kate Bessey left CMLE in January to return to her librarian role at Rasmussen College.
- Michelle Kiley began as our invaluable new Information Specialist upon Kate’s departure.
- I took a six week medical leave of absence to replace a very worn out hip in mid-February. Ouch, but much better now!
- Upon my return we initiated seven Quick Question Polls (QQP’s) on various topics to gather data to help us refocus our programming in FY14.
- In early June, I will return to the orthopedic workshop for a new knee. I know, it’s been a tough year! Michelle proved her ability to hold down the fort during my first leave, and will valiantly do the same this summer.
Our summer CMLE to-do list is quite different from our weekly work during the academic year. Summer is an important time for administrative work including year-end reports, discount agreements, internal system updates, program planning, and our commitments to library conference planning too. So, it might seem a bit sad, but our Weekly Review and associated blog posts will be on a short hiatus during the summer months, but we will be back in the Fall! We will continue to wrap our arms around the glut of library news and opportunity, distill it down to an easy to digest format, and write it up again for you starting in September. We remain committed to offering tips, shortcuts and application ideas too. According to one of our QQP’s, many of you will be gearing down a bit in your professional summer reading too, so we hope this little blip in service gives everyone a refreshing “breather”. Watch your email in the event that something significant happens this summer that we feel a need to share immediately. Otherwise, enjoy quiet moments of summer serenity curled up with a good book under a big shady tree. Summer is a great time to renew and refresh. See you online in the Fall!
Didn’t have time to read any of our blog posts this year? Go to http://cmleinfofeed.wordpress.com/ and meander through this year’s posts!
