Linking Our Libraries

This season we are moving through the state of Minnesota, looking at an interesting fact about each county and giving you a book prompt from that fact. We will share six book suggestions to meet that prompt, to get you started on reading new books. You can also take that prompt and find any other book to meet the challenge!

This week we look at a nearby county: Anoka! This is an adaptation of a Dakota word meaning both sides. So this week we challenge you to read a book with multiple perspectives.

We give you links to each of these books on our show notes page, taking you to Amazon.com. If you click on any of them, and buy anything at all - including a nice book - Amazon will send us a small percent of the profits they made on these sales. Thank you for supporting CMLE!

We are the Central Minnesota Libraries Exchange, a multitype system serving all types of libraries. We are here to help you find new books, for yourself or for your library.

Find links to all the books we share on our full show notes page.

This season we are moving through the state of Minnesota, looking at an interesting fact about each county and giving you a book prompt from that fact. We will share six book suggestions to meet that prompt, to get you started on reading new books. You can also take that prompt and find any other book to meet the challenge!

Our first county is one special to us, because it is one of the 12 counties where CMLE serves the libraries: Aitkin! The county was named after William Alexander Aitken (1785-1851), early fur trader with Ojibwe Indians in this area. This week’s challenge is to read a book with a furry animal.

Check out our full show notes page here.

Welcome back to Season Eight of Linking Our Libraries! We are so happy to have you with us today! Because this is a big episode: our final episode of Season Eight and our 100th Episode!

It has been so exciting to be part of the library world with this podcast! We want to thank all of our Guest Hosts over the years, who have been so gracious to share their experiences and their ideas with us. 

We want to thank you, the listeners, who have been with us since the beginning – special thanks to Chuck and Ralph who have been such good supporters! We want to thank people who drop in for episodes they like. And also to the listeners who are newbies – it’s great to have you join us.

Let’s take a trip back in time, and revisit some of the past ideas we have covered together.

We are getting near the end of this season, and next week is going to be exciting. So this week, we are going to look toward the future! We are going to walk through some strategies you can use to do some needs assessment and strategic planning for your library. It doesn’t matter how big or small your library is, you can always work on some plans for the future.

Check out our show notes page here, with links to all the resources we talk about today, and to the books we share.

Today we have a Guest Host joining us! Julianne Trebelhorn has been a member of the Traverse des Sioux Library System board, as well as the Sibley County library board. She is here today to talk about what it takes to be a board member for libraries, and to help the libraries succeed!

Check out our show notes here, to get all the links to the material we share today and to the books we discuss.

Today we are going to talk about skills that will be useful in most libraries. Working with teens is not everyone’s favorite part of library service, but this is an important group in the library. We will walk through some steps to help you to serve these patrons who can be energetic advocates for your library!

Teens can be a great segment of your library community - filled with energy, and ideas, and ready to bring new things to your work! And those same attributes can make them a challenge to work with, especially when they turn that same energy to not-so-great ideas. This is true of any group of people in the library, but it seems to be more noticeable in teens. 

So today we will look at the latest work from the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA) to help everyone working with teens to build their skills. For those who already enjoy working with teens: great! Here are some new ways to think about what you are doing, and how it can continue to build. And for those who have been hesitant to engage with this group: getting comfortable with some new ideas and strategies may make it easier for you both.

We are taking today’s material from the American Library Association’s YALSA page, and will link to all of this in our show notes. They provide a lot more material than we will discuss today, including charts and infographics, so check them out!

If you have spent any amount of time answering questions from patrons, you know some of this already. They often do not know how to ask for exactly what they need, and you have to wade through it all to figure out how to help everyone get what they need. As with so many other things you can do in libraries, there is a procedure developed just for you!

When people think about libraries, they envision a nice older lady sitting behind a desk with some quiet, well-behaved people lining up to ask clever, interesting questions.

You do not need to have been working in a library too long to see a few flaws in this vision! Sure, a lot of library people are nice older females. And that is about where it ends. Libraries today do not focus on being quiet. We have some well-behaved patrons. 

But questions tend to be the challenging part. Not always in answering them - we have skills in doing Reference work that allows librarians to to find all kinds of great things. Figuring out how to interpret questions, and to get the best information is one of the best skills we have in our skills toolbox. 

A complete reference interview will have seven steps. Sometimes, with a quick question, you can condense these. But it’s still a good idea to think about each of them, just to be sure you have done everything necessary to help your patron.

As you can probably guess, since you are currently listening to us talk, we are not only fans of podcasts but we also create them! These are a relatively easy way for libraries to share ideas and information with their community members. Today we will walk through some of the steps you can follow to help your library to create and share audio information in podcast form!   

So, think through all of the material we are going to share with you today before you make a final decision on whether or not to start a podcast. Of course, we are always happy to have more, good quality podcasts in the library world! We would love for you to join us!

But there is nothing wrong with being a good podcast consumer, and not starting one of your own. There are enough podcasts that only went three episodes, podcasts with terrible audio quality, podcasts that are just people giggling over how hard it is to have something interesting to say. We do not need more of them.

As with so many things we talk about here, thinking about your strategy, and making a good plan for success, will be very helpful to you in creating a good podcast. And actively deciding not to make a podcast may also be a good decision for you!

We are talking to you from Minnesota, and our state has recently set up requirements for teachers in their licensure requirements to take seminars in cultural competencies. Today we are going to briefly look at the topics covered in this training, and see how it can apply in library work.

It is the job of libraries to serve the information needs of their community members - all of their community members. And most of us are pretty nice people, who try to make that happen. But most of us are also middle aged white women. These are not bad qualities, it is just limiting in perspective. Nobody can know all things, or have all experiences. So working in libraries means it is important to reach out to different sources of information, so we are ready to provide the best, most diverse sources of ideas to share with our community.

There are all kinds of cultural competencies we could be discussing. But for the purposes of today’s discussion we will look at the topics identified by Minnesota for teachers to work with.

What are cultural competencies?

In the state statutes, “"Cultural competency training" means a training program that promotes self-reflection and discussion including but not limited to all of the following topics: racial, cultural, and socioeconomic groups; American Indian and Alaskan native students; religion; systemic racism; gender identity, including transgender students; sexual orientation; language diversity; and individuals with disabilities and mental health concerns.”  

The state has standards for the results they want to see from the training, and what people can expect to take into their work. “Training programs must be designed to deepen teachers' understanding of their own frames of reference, the potential bias in these frames, and their impact on expectations for and relationships with students, students' families, and the school communities…”

We are working from the perspective of libraries and library staff, so we are interested not only in the work of building our own skills, but also in providing information to members of our community. So today we are going to browse through these competencies and some ideas and resources. These will be useful to all of us, as well as useful to pass on to your community members.

Welcome back to Season Eight of Linking Our Libraries! We are so happy to have you with us this season!

You can find our show notes page here, with all the information we discuss here today, links to all kinds of resources, and links to the books we share.

We are the Central Minnesota Libraries Exchange. Our members are libraries of all sorts: public, schools, academics, special libraries, archives, and history centers. Join us in working thorough skills library staffers can use to be more successful in their work!

One of the most frequent questions we get from our members is how they can start to set up a makerspace. And of course, there are as many possible answers to that as there are libraries.Today we will walk through a few basic ideas, to be sure you can feel confident in your own library’s makerspace.

We have talked to several people who were worried they would not be able to set up their makerspaces the right way. So we have good news to share right away: There is no “right” way to do this! Your makerspace can be as individual as your library. As with so many things, you just have to get started. You can always refine it as you go along.