Does your academic library do some neat orientation work? Have you spent time thinking about how to best address your patrons’ information needs? Is your orientation educational AND fun??
Share it with your professional colleagues!
Continue reading Call for book chapter proposals: Academic Library Orientations
Each month we’ll bring you a compiled list of fun national holidays, birthdays of authors, and publication dates of favorite books. You can use these for your own personal use or for some library inspiration! Share what inspired you in the comments.
January is National Hobby Month! Other things to celebrate in January. . .
The following post was submitted by CMLE scholarship recipient Amanda Holstrom, Instructional Technology Specialist at Sartell Middle School.
At TIES this year I was exposed to many great things and returned with more ideas than I can count. The two things that come to mind as great takeaways are: the importance of giving children choice and maker spaces are not just for technology gadgets. Buddy Berry talked about surprise and delight with education including giving children the choice to find their own educational path. This thinking amplifies the needs for free learning and exploration in schools. The session on Makers Spaces opened my eyes to the importance of incorporating non-tech items into the Learning Lab. This need was highlighted over and over again throughout the presentation. Maker Spaces are about making, not just working with electronics.
In our Learning Lab this year we have done many robotics and coding items that take some level of patience and background knowledge. I plan to incorporate crocheting into our Learning Lab and link it with coding to provide that needed background knowledge. Reading a crochet patterns is a “code” that needs to be followed in order to reach a desired end. I feel that bringing that into our Learning Lab will teach and highlight a skill many do not have as well as provide background knowledge for those not experienced with coding. By bridging this gap in our lab I hope to reach more diverse students with the desire to learn hands on and gravitate towards our space. I am very excited to see what other ideas we come up with to add to our space that are non-tech. I think the students will be excited to build and take things home.
As we close out an interesting 2016, CMLE is moving ahead with our book groups! If you have time over your holiday celebrations, you might check out our latest additions to our book groups. As always, this is a low-key opportunity to read books; so read and join in the comments, read the discussion questions, or just read the book and think thoughts to yourself and chat with your colleagues about the latest picks. Whatever works best for you is fine! (We are library people; we just like to read!)
For the CMLE Professional selection, in January we are going with How to Win Friends and Influence People. It seemed like a good choice for January, when many of us are working on our New Year’s resolutions, and thinking about ways to improve our work lives. Dale Carnegie’s book is a classic, and can help to jump-start all of us in making new relationships. At CMLE Headquarters, building relationships around our system, and across the profession, is our main goal! So let’s all make this a part of our daily work.
Of course, we also have a “for fun” book selection in the Enjoying Books group. This month we are going with The Ice Queen by Alice Hoffman. As always, our book pick has a librarian as the main character. We are moving through different genres each month, and in this literary fiction book you have the chance to look at all kinds of imagery of fire and ice. Have you read any of her other books? It would be interesting to see what kinds of themes and symbolism carry over across her many novels!
Enjoy your holiday! Enjoy your reading! And come back to us in January – ready to do some great library work!!
As library people, we spend a lot of time thinking about Information Literacy. It is our role to help members of our communities to learn about the information they need – not just to train them to look things up. Our jobs in this area are increasing as we see the numbers of people who can not identify fake news from real news. And of course, this is a much larger and broader topic – impacting things we do all the time.
Library people around the world are also working on this issue, and working to connect information with their communities served. If you would like an opportunity to go talk with some of your international colleagues, submit a proposal to the Fifth European Conference on Information Literacy. It will be held from 18-21 September 2017 in Saint-Malo France.
Although I have not been to this conference, I have talked with people who went in past years and really enjoyed it! I have worked as a reviewer of the proposals, and they sound interesting – useful in all kinds of libraries.
Even if you are not able to attend this conference, or not this year at least (it moves to different locations across Europe each year!); it is good to know that the issues we are looking at in our libraries are the same issues library people everywhere work with in their libraries. You may keep your eyes on the presenters, to see what kinds of topics they discuss to get strategy ideas for yourself. And these are people you could contact to see ask questions about their ideas and their programs!
If you are interested in submitting a proposal, but not sure where to start – contact us here at CMLE Headquarters. We can help you put your ideas into words, and into a format that shows off the work you are doing!
Read about the conference, and the many different topics they will be discussing, after the break! Don’t be bashful about reaching out to your colleagues across the profession – we are all here to help each other, and to make our libraries better!
Central Minnesota Libraries Exchange 