August 31, 2010 by Kathleen Hughes ( No Comments )
State Farm is teaming up with Youth Service America (YSA) to offer grants of up to $1,000 to youth-led service-learning initiatives in all fifty states, the District of Columbia, and the Canadian provinces of Alberta, Ontario, and New Brunswick. Eligible programs will engage youth in service-learning, an effective teaching and learning strategy that promotes student learning, academic achievement, workplace readiness, and healthy communities.
State Farm Good Neighbor Service-Learning Grants encourage semester-long projects (following YSA’s Semester of Service framework) that launch on the Martin Luther King, Jr. Day of Service, January 17, 2011, and culminate on Global Youth Service Day, April 15-17, 2011. Eligible candidates include teachers, service-learning coordinators, and students in a public school, or staff and youth in a community-based organization working with a public school.
YSA will host two application webinars, September 7 and October 7, for applicants to learn more about developing a successful project.
Webinar registration information and application materials are available at the YSA Web site.
A project of the Richmond Rivets in collaboration with the Richmond Public Library, the ‘Richmond Grows Seed-Lending Library’ opened in May 2010 and allows the public to ‘borrow’ seeds for free, hoping that borrowers will donate seeds back to the library following harvest. It is believed to be the only seed-lending library currently operating in a public library in the U.S. The Seed-Lending Library is also a fiscally sponsored project of Urban Tith and can accept tax-deductible donations through them. More information about the Richmond Public Library is here and more information about the Seed-Lending Library is here.
Parents are always looking for new ways to entertain their kids. So help them out! Send them home with one of these engaging reading tools. You’ll find book lists, posters, stickers, sing-a-longs, rhymes–they’re packets full of fun and education! And for a limited time, they’re on sale! Each publication below is 40% off through August 31, 2010. Combine it with your 10% ALA discount and…you get 50% off! All you have to do is enter the promotion code “sale10″ whether you order through phone (1-866-Shop ALA), fax (770-280-4155), or online.
75 of the Best Books for Young Readers
Available in packets of 25 for libraries to distribute to their young readers, this poster lists some of the very best board books and picture books to read to children from birth through preschool. List includes classics, books that teach important concepts, stories to sing, books with rhyme and rhythm, and books for bedtime. Includes “how to use this poster” guidelines and stickers to add to poster as books are read.
Created by the West Bloomfield Township (Michigan) Public Library. Item #2009-0002. Sale Price: $27.50 for members, $33.00 for nonmembers. USE PROMO CODE “sale10″
_____________________________________________________________
100 of the Best Books to Read in Kindergarten
Available in packets of 25 for libraries to distribute to their young readers, this poster kit lists some of the very best picture books to read aloud to Kindergarten-age children. The list includes well-loved classics as well as quality contemporary books. Designed so that books can be checked off as they are read.
Kit includes two different poster designs (100 Best Books to Read in Kindergarten and 100 More Books to Read in Kindergarten, parent guide, and bookmarks).
Created by the West Bloomfield Township (Michigan) Public Library. Item #2009-0001. Sale Price: $37.50 for members, $45 for nonmembers USE PROMO CODE “sale10″
_____________________________________________________________
Nursery Rhymes, Songs and Fingerplays
Encourage parents to read nursery rhymes to their preschool children by giving them a copy of Nursery Rhymes, Songs & Fingerplays , a delightful collection of more than 80 of the best rhyming verses for children. This colorful, 20-page booklet makes it easy to share rhymes, songs and fingerplays with children.
Available in packs of 50. Item #701. Sale Price: $32.00 for members, $38.00 for nonmembers USE PROMO CODE “sale10.”
Through the Strong Communities: Engaging Citizens, Strengthening Place, Inspiring Change competition, Ashoka’s Changemakers and CommunityMatters are inviting individuals and organizations to submit innovative projects and ideas to engage citizens in building strong communities across the United States and Canada.
The Strong Communities competition is open to all types of individuals and organizations (charitable and nonprofit organizations, private companies, and public entities). The competition will consider all entries that reflect the theme of the challenge. To be considered for an award, entries must indicate growth beyond the conceptual stage and have demonstrated social impact and sustainability. While the program supports new ideas at every stage and encourages their entry, the judges are better able to evaluate projects that are beyond the conceptual stage and have demonstrated proof of impact.
CommunityMatters is interested in solutions from a variety of disciplines, including but not limited to)conservation, planning, economics, politics, education, deliberative democracy, and the arts, and especially encourages submission of interdisciplinary approaches. CommunityMatters has a special interest in receiving submissions from young people.
Online competition submissions will be accepted until August 11, 2010. At any time before this deadline, competition participants are encouraged to revise their entries based on questions and insights that they receive in the Changemakers online discussion
An expert panel will review entries and select eight finalists by September 22, 2010. The Changemakers community will then vote online to select the award-winners from the field of finalists. Each of the eight finalists will be showcased at the CommunityMatters 2010 conference. One person representing each of the eight finalist entries will win the opportunity to attend the conference (includes conference and workshop registration, lodging, transportation, and meals). The top three finalists will win $5,000 each.
Primary Subject: Community Improvement/Development
Geographic Funding Area: National
*********************************** Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy Accepting Applications for 2011 National Grant Program
The Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy is accepting applications for its annual national grant competition. The grantmaking program is designed to help develop or expand projects that support the development of literacy skills for adult primary care givers and their children.
To be eligible for funding, the applicant organization must have nonprofit or public status and must have been in existence for two or more years. The organization must operate an instructional literacy program that has been in existence for at least two years and includes one or more of the following components: literacy for adults, parent education, pre-literacy or literacy instruction for children pre-K to grade three, and/or intergenerational literacy activities (parent and child together time).
A total of approximately $650,000 in grants will be awarded in 2011; grant requests should not exceed $65,000.
The National Grant Program application and guidelines are available at the foundation’s Web site.
I admit I was skeptical when signing up for a Twitter account last spring. Another site to check when I pop online? Did I really want to commit to that? I quickly fell down the rabbit hole that is Twitter when I discovered how easy it was to stay up-to-date with concurrent conference events during last year’s Annual meeting in Chicago, which I attended in person. I was unable to make it to Washington D.C. this year, but the tidbits posted by participants who used the #ala10 hashtag helped to satisfy my curiosity. The fun continued with #virtala10, the hashtag used by attendees of the Virtual Conference sessions on Wednesday, July 7th, and Thursday, July 8th. I added both hashtags to my list of saved Twitter searches so that real-time updates were never more than a click away. (Unfortunately, Twitter limits the search availability of “older” tweets. Act now if you want to catch what was tagged!)
During this spring’s PLA conference in Portland, Oregon, Gretchen Kolderup observed that the stream of tweets tagged with #pla10 could be likened to “a roomful of people talking at and not with each other.” The stream for this year’s Annual followed a similar trend. Whenever I scanned the most recent tweets, I didn’t catch many back-and-forth exchanges using either hashtag. Messages tended to be brief bursts of ideas and resources gained from sessions rather than ongoing discussions. A year’s worth of following various conference activities through Twitter has given me the sense that this is often the case with on-the-go conference updates, but I don’t mind the fragmentation. Even if conference tweets don’t spark an in-the-moment conversation through @-replies or the site’s direct message feature, they can foster connection among Twitter users at a later time. Aside from harvesting links to conference notes or video footage, one of my favorite ways to make use of the stream is simply to see who is using it. Conference hashtags are a great resource for finding fellow librarians, technology buffs, and booklovers to chat with long after conference events have wrapped up.
There are some elements of the ALA Annual experience the Twitter stream can’t replicate, of course. That wicked case of conference shoulder from lugging bags around? Can’t say I missed that! Face-to-face interaction with people who care about library services as much as I do? I wish I could have had that opportunity this summer, and hope to see you all in New Orleans next year. Many, many thanks to everyone who indulged those of us at home with updates from this year’s physical and virtual conferences!
July 05, 2010 by angelina_manfredi ( No Comments )
I have to echo P. Sweeney: I really did plan to blog more, but I got sucked into the whirlwind of activity and joy and exhaustion that IS conference. Additionally, I spent a lot of time doing committee and process work for YALSA, some of which is confidential, so it doesn’t really lend itself to blogging! Thus my copying of P. Sweeney continues: here are five of my highlights from 2010 ALA Annual.
My Top 5 ALA Annual Experiences
1. Library Advocacy Day
2. Promoting Teen Reading with Web 2.0 Tools preconference
3. Networking
4. Teen Spaces: Design with Economy session
5. The Stacks (yes, the exhibits!)
More detail about all this good stuff after the cut!
At ALA there are always multiple session that I want to attend that are scheduled at the same time. Knowing that you can leave a session before it is completely over; I left the “I’m Doing Events at My Library” session with 45 minutes to go so that I could pop in on the “Poetry as a Community Builder” session. I’m so glad I did.
I buy the poetry books in the library where I work, so I wanted to go to some sessions about poetry. From the time a stepped into the room and stood against the back wall I was engaged in this presentation. I had simply hoped to pick up the handouts (they had run out of handouts), but I found myself more than a little interested in the topic The Loudoun County Public Library in Virginia is doing amazing programming with poetry as a theme. The librarian that spoke about the activities was very enthusiastic and made me want to get to work at my library.
The Loudoun County Public Library has a Poet in Residence – Kwame Alexander – who was at the session and is quite a character. He did a reading during the presentation, and another one at the Reading Stage in the Stacks. I enjoyed them both. Beyond being a poet, he is also responsible for a program entitled “Book in a Day.” To make a long (but good) story short, he went into a school and managed to get students to work through the day to organize, edit, plan, design and prepare a book for publication. These students were able to do the work and get published!! What a sense of satisfaction they must have.
I signed up to get the handouts emailed to me. They must be busy returning to their regular jobs since that hasn’t happened yet. To get you started, here are a couple of the web sites they provided: The Poetry Foundation and Poets.org.
This session dealt with bringing authors to libraries to provide programs for the community. These programs are also worthwhile as fund-raising events and provide public relations opportunities. The session was presented by librarians from the St. Louis County Library. They have an awesome program, run by Carrie Robb, who was spirited away from a corporate position to facilitate the author program series. Her expertise is what has made this program a success, in my opinion. Also since planning these events is her full time job she has the time to pursue all leads for great authors and make those community connections which bring support, both financial and media related.
The St. Louis County Library System hosts 50 author events a year, for both children and adult, with attendance of over 200,000 people. Programs generally begin about 7:30 which is during library hours Monday through Thursday, but is after hours on Friday and Saturday night. That means they have a very dedicated staff to pursue programming after normal ‘business’ hours.
The professional connections that Ms. Robb had made in her previous career certainly helped her get started with encouraging authors to add St. Louis County to their book tours. She knew ‘how it worked’ and was able to make inroads faster than many of us would be able to do. Thank goodness she was willing to give us an outline of how to get started!!
First, realize that this undertaking doesn’t happen in a few months. She says proposals and ideas have to be worked out 6 months or more ahead of a scheduled event. (Another speaker later in the day also emphasized that you can’t get events done at your library in ‘weeks’ if you want to prepare and advertise appropriately.) Also, if you are just starting out – don’t expect Stephenie Meyer or James Patterson as your first author. Ms. Robb said that Paula Deen’s fee is $100,000. That takes a lot of support from corporations in the community.
So why would your library system be of interest to a publishing company? When would they consider bringing an author to your community? Publishing companies are looking for major metropolitan areas with a strong book market. They want your library to have a partnership with a book store that reports its sales to the NYT so book sales figures improve. The publisher needs you to have a venue large enough to be worth their trip. The St. Louis County venues hold either 300 or 900, with plenty of parking. Your library should have strong ties to the media in your area so you can hope for converage both in print and on-air. Corporate sponsors that hold receptions or invite special groups to the event can also improve your chances of securing an author.
So where do you go to find money? Library and Arts Grants. Literacy Grants from Target or Sam’s Club or Walmart. State Arts and Humanties Councils. National Endowment for the Arts. Corporations such as Boeing, Whole Foods or a bank – they still really do have money. Donor groups such as a foundation that might get perks for their participation are a possibility. The millionaires in your community. You can also negotiate to get a % of the book sale profits.
Getting started is, perhaps, the hard part. Start making the bookseller connections. Pair local, regional authors from the local university, the English dept, the history dept. Allow time to create promotional materials such as bookmarks and posters. By creating visuals for this specific author, you impress the author and the publisher. Organizing a series of author’s visits with a theme can show the authors the continuity you envision.
Getting the community to attend is the next job. Maximize media converage – work those partnerships. Send out an email blast if you’ve captured email addresses and received permission from the customers to send them emails. Reach out to special groups, perhaps with special perks. Don’t forget to Twit, Blog and add information to Facebook.
Anyone getting started with an author series needs to start small, but hearing the details of the St. Louis County large initiative certainly makes you want to get in the game.
This year’s annual American Library Association conference was a whirlwind of activity for me. I was hoping that I could write blog posts everyday on everything amazing that happened. Unfortunately, I never had any time between meetings, sessions, and social events to write anything including a stack of postcards that I bought at the Library of Congress. However, I will present a brief summary the top 5 experiences that I had over the course of the week in Washington DC with my fellow librarians. These are presented in no particular order.
1- ALA Think Tank
A couple of months before the conference I was invited to stay in a rented apartment with 13 librarians who were in various areas of their careers and the profession. Some of us were managers and directors and some of us were library students. Everyone was a leader and had something great to bring to the house and share with the rest.
There were a few great experiences that I got from being a part of this conference tribe. I was able to attend a social in the president’s suite and meet amazing luminaries in the profession. I knew where all of the best sessions and workshops were happening. I was inspired by fantastic ideas and concepts during our morning, lunch, or evening meetingups when we simply sat around the house and talked about each of our experiences in the profession. Some of the best times were had when we were just sitting around the house and talking to each other and getting to know everyone. Librarians Unplugged
Of course, anytime there are 13 leaders in a small space there were some times of conflict and drama, but these were pale in comparison to the great experiences that I gained and the fantastic people I met.
2-Battledecks
On Monday night Janie Herman brought another EPIC edition of Battledecks to ALA. Battledecks is a competition where some of the best presenters in librarianship are given around 10-12 slides that they have never seen before and are also given a topic having something to do with librarianship that they have to relate back to the slides. The slides have almost nothing to do with libraries and instead are filled with images of LOLcats, funny charts and graphics, and other humorous photos and phrases. The competitors are judged by a panel of judges and ties are broken with an applaus’o’meter. This year’s winner was Jason Griffey.
3-ALA Dance Party
ALA Dance Party was organized by the good folks over at www.8bitlibrary.com. This was an event not sponsored by ALA but was advertised almost entirely via Twitter and Facebook and various blogs in an almost guerrilla like fashion. In the end, about a hundred librarians showed up to the Apex nightclub on Friday night and danced until the early morning hours. Some of the attendees included Joe Murphy, Loida Garcia-Febo, and Stephan Abrams and far too many other amazing folks to name. Here is a short video just to give you an idea for the ALA dance events to come at the next conference.
4- Library of Congress
One of the Librarians from the Think Tank named Tiffany Mair and I braved the morning heat and humidity of DC and walked to the Library of Congress in the hopes of having a tour. Of course, with 27,000 librarians in DC it was almost impossible to get a spot in the tour. So instead, we took ourselves on a smaller self-guided tour and took a look at the displays of Carl Jung, early America, Thomas Jefferson’s private library, and some of the various other smaller works being shown. I can’t complain about missing the tour because there was so much to see just by simply walking around without a guide.
5- COPE’s Session on creating a Social Networking Policy
As a member of the Committee on Professional Ethics, I was very excited to attend our session on creating Social Networking Policies in libraries. I hadn’t realized that navigating the legal and ethical framework of these policies could be so difficult. For example, I learned that its possible that the legality of deleting or editing comments by patrons on library social networks could be a violation of first amendment rights if there is not a clearly written policy in place. You can see more of the thoughts and ideas that come from this session, and future COPE sessions, by searching the #ALAethics hashtag on Twitter.
Overall, I can’t imagine a better way to have spent my ALA Annual Conference then the way I did. It was filled with amazing new information, fun experiences, and meeting fantastic people. Now I’m already excited to get ready for midwinter and I hope I get to meet you there!
