• Lifestyle

    2017 Anna Dewdney Read Together Award Finalists

    The first annual Anna Dewdney Read Together Award finalists were announced last week and I didn’t get a chance to post this yet, so here goes. Anna Dewdney, children’s book author and illustrator, most well-known for her series Llama Llama passed away last year of brain cancer at the age of…

  • Lifestyle

    SLJ's Battle of the Kids' Books

    Where do I even begin? This somehow got past me this year, so we’re in the think of round 1 matches right now.  A little background behind this fun event – The School Library’s Battle of the Kids’ Books is a competition among 16 of the very best titles published…

  • Lifestyle

    Federal Budget Cuts, or What Is the IMLS?

    As I promised in a previous post, this is not a blog to become political, but it is a blog to be educated about library issues and this issue is too big to ignore. This post is longer than usual, but I really want people to understand what the IMLS…

  • Lifestyle

    Community Survey Results

    We created a community survey using Survey Monkey and also had it available on paper for people who stopped in the library and were willing to fill it out. After about six weeks, we gathered 333 responses, about 1/3 of which were gathered online, while the majority were gathered on…

  • Lifestyle

    Director's Thoughts #7

    Today, yesterday, and the day before that, and the day before that and the weeks leading up to this point were spent getting our system ready to migrate to the cloud. And not just my library, but our whole consortium, so you can imagine the amount of work that goes…

  • Lifestyle

    Warm & Fuzzies & Frustration

    It’s storytime folks, so get comfortable and read on about this experience I had recently that is probably not at all shocking for other librarians, but may be eye-opening for non-librarian readers. Two older gentlemen came up to the desk the other day and I happened to be able to…

  • Lifestyle

    Children's & Teen Choice Book Awards

    The 2017 Children’ & Teen Choice Book Awards are ready to be voted on from March 3 – May 7. This is the only national book award that is voted on only by kids and teens.  A number of schools and states have their own awards, but this is the…

  • Lifestyle

    Library Card Drive

    I spent a few hours last night at our new community center talking with residents about the library and signing up residents with library cards. Many of the people I saw come through the doors were people I see in the library on a regular basis. I gave them updated…

  • Lifestyle

    Uncommon Partnerships – Government Access

    We’re lucky to have a very strong connection with our local government access channel. They help us by filming large programs and running them on our government access channel at a later date.  They also help us by creating Public Service Announcements for our summer reading program and for other…