Category: Uncategorized
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Creative Formulas and Being Mindful
“Essential Skills + Mindset² x Support = Success” (Stephens, 2019, p. 32). When I was a young college student, I was majoring in psychology. In one class, my professor, Dr. Sharon Ng, discussed the role of art in therapy, how it helped people to “bleed onto the page”. That concept has stayed with me, even…
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Director’s Brief
To serve the Point Arena, California community with the opportunity for evolving educational needs, empowering Mendocino County patrons to communicate with library staff about what and how they wish to learn… read more
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Always Learning
There are many types of learning. We can learn a lot just from observing—just paying attention in a library space can lead to many learning opportunities—and that observation can lead to even more levels of learning. Modeling is a technique used when training new staff members. Someone who has worked on the circulation desk for…
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We Are Stories
A few years ago, I took a class on video editing. At the time, I was in charge of social media for a locally owned business, and videos were becoming the thing. We learned how to storyboard, how to keep photographs from feeling static, and how to sync sound with image. Most of all, we…
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Planning for Participatory Service: Culinary Literacy
Culinary Literacy Service at the Nevada County Community Library Goals & Objectives For three years, Nevada County Community Library has been offering youth ages 0-18 Lunch at the Library during its Summer Learning Program (Friends of the Nevada County Libraries, 2019). In its first summer, the program reached almost 2,000 participants (Friends of the Nevada…
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The Public Library Community
The day was winding down, and I was doing one last check on the library’s social media before I started to set up for an outside teen program. A notification popped up saying that our library had been tagged by Placer County Public Library. When I investigated further, I discovered that we had been challenged…
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Library As Connector
The phone rang at the circulation desk, echoing through the quiet, empty space. There were only three of us in the library, as our team had been broken up into separate groups to prevent the potential risk of COVID-19 spreading among employees. Our cohort was working to get holds organized, bagged, and ready for curbside…
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Radical Candor and Heart-Driven Libraries
Being a manager is not something that all future librarians are focused on. In fact, if one did an informal poll of the students in the Master of Library and Information Science program, many might say that they would eschew leadership roles. However, being a librarian of any sort is also being a leader. Librarians…
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New Frontiers in Library Services
One of the things that is interesting about the foundational readings—pieces written within the two decades spanning 1992-2012—is how current the recommendations feel during the time of COVID-19 and library closures. As Mathews (2012) states, “It’s not about adding features, but about new processes” (p. 1). Throughout the past year and a half, libraries have…
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Hello Everyone
Once upon a time, there was a very new blogger—practically a baby blogger—who created a website named after the online alias she had chosen in the mid ’90s, but then thought the blog should be called something different. It may not have been the correct marketing choice, but she was still learning. The name she…
Book Syrup 