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April 2024 |
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Adult Services Notes |
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Library of Virginia Training |
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Resources for Answering Difficult Patron Questions
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Serving users with legal, medical, and consumer finance questions can be a challenge for many reasons. Library staff are not, generally, lawyers, doctors, or financial advisors, and these types of questions can often get complex quickly. There are some great resources out there from specialists in these areas that can help library staff and patrons in a variety of ways. Additionally, these topic areas offer opportunities to develop valuable, patron-centered library programming.
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This new online training series will feature guest speakers from the Network for the National Library of Medicine, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the Virginia State Law Library, and more to talk about how they and their colleagues provide resources, programming ideas, and assistance to public libraries and their users. All the programs will be recorded and shared in the LVA Niche Academy.
| Dates, Descriptions, & Registration Links |
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News from Library Development & Networking
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Read It!, included in Find It VA, includes highly engaging yet easy-to-read articles with fast-paced stories on high-interest themes. You may know this material as “high/low.” Read It! caters to high school students and adults with foundational English skills seeking level-appropriate reading material. Subjects include History, Civics and Culture, Life Skills, Literature, and Science.
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What’s in Read It! for middle and high school students?
Read It! is designed to draw kids and teens in even if they've previously been reluctant readers. It includes world cultures articles that are ideal for country reports with histories; basic facts such as population and language; climate; economy; government; and a comprehension quiz in each article.
Featured topics include short biographies of U.S. presidents. You can sort presidents by date or by name; articles include graphics with photos or paintings; content includes a timeline of their life and key points in their political careers, and a short, simple glossary of terms.
Read It! includes biographies of historical and contemporary authors as well as book summaries. Summaries focus on high interest titles such as The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins as well as titles often read in the classroom such as Beloved by Toni Morrison.
Students seeking material for biographies of scientists will find a wide range to choose among, from Archimedes of Syracuse to Neil DeGrasse Tyson. Students who begin using Read It! for civics and history will also find gems like worksheets that scale to higher mathematics including ratios, statistics, square roots, and scientific notations.
Key Takeaways:
Target users include middle and high school students.
Read It! Features classroom content on History, Civics, Culture, Literature, and Science.
Highly engaging content with a focus on level-appropriate reading material for easy comprehension.
Designed for improved reading skills in English. EBSCO’s Read It database can be searched from your library website through Explora or as a stand-alone product.
You can learn more about Read It! In the Public Library Staff Certificate pathway on Find it VA that is available in Niche Academy. You can also learn more about marketing Read It! Via the Marketing Find it VA pathway also in Niche Academy. |
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This month's Find It VA Tips column was written by Sonya Schryer Norris, our Niche Academy Consultant, who notes that she used MaxAI to wordsmith this piece.
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Virginia Open Data Portal
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Capabilities of the portal include viewing and exporting data, viewing APIs, and exploring visualizations. Overall, the portal promotes government transparency by working to provide access to data in one centralized location. The portal now hosts over 500 state datasets and the ODGA team works to add new datasets from state agencies daily.
The ODGA team is asking for Virginia libraries’ help in promoting the Virginia Open Data Portal. Libraries can feel free to add the link to the portal onto their websites: https://data.virginia.gov/. |
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Southeast Collaborative Conference
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The Southeast Collaborative Online Conference (SECC) is a collective effort by the Georgia Public Library Service, the State Library of North Carolina, the South Carolina State Library, the Tennessee State Library & Archives, and the Library of Virginia, to offer innovative and useful online learning experiences for library staff at all levels through a convenient online conference.
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If you missed the live conference last month, you can view the 2024 sessions, including six presentations by Virginia librarians, in the LVA Niche Academy. The Library of Virginia also hosts archived recordings of past conference programs back to 2020 in Niche Academy. View the SECC program archive.
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Niche Academy is open to all Virginia library staff members and library associates such as trustees and Friends board members. If you do not have a Niche Academy account, please use your library email address to sign up. If you do not have a library work email, you may register with a personal email, and we will contact you to confirm that you are affiliated with a Virginia library.
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Cell provider T-Mobile offers Hometown Grants every quarter to up to 25 small towns with populations of less than 50,000. Grants of up to $50,000 may be used to fund shovel-ready projects that "build, rebuild, or refresh community spaces that help foster local connections in your town."
According to the T-Mobile Homegrown site, "Examples of eligible projects include but are not limited to: adaptive uses of older and historic buildings into community gathering spaces, improvements to outdoor parks or trails, and technology projects for the public library."
The next round of applications opens April 1 and closes June 30. Find out more about requirements and deadlines at Hometown Grants. |
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Readers' Advisory Tips and Tricks
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The Oscars are over for another year, but readers are always interested in making connections between books they enjoy and the movies made from those books (or vice versa).
You can spend hours arguing over which was better the book or the film (just ask any Lord of the Rings fan!), but our job as readers' advisors is not to judge but to help readers and viewers make connections that they might not have thought about. Even if you are not a film-goer, you can help support these interests by using NoveList. |
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There are a couple of useful tools here:
If you are interested in current releases, be sure to check out the Page to Screen -- 2024 article in NoveList. It is updated on a regular basis, so check back frequently to see what's been added.
To find older screen adaptations, you can use a genre search, as NoveList has added "page to screen" as a genre. Use this seach, GX Page to screen, to pull up almost 4000 titles covering both fiction and nonfiction books as well as titles for younger readers. Use the Refine Results tools on teh left side of the page to narrow your choices down.
Page to screen books/films can be a great reading list or book display (be sure to scatter in some actor bios or DVDs), as well as an opportunity to connect with film fans in your community. |
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International Pen Pal Program |
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Letter writing is not a dead art, and the success of an international pen pal program at Kent County Public Library in Delaware proves the point.
According to the library, "[h]undreds of patrons in Delaware, US and Wellington, New Zealand are participating in an ongoing pen pal program that began in June 2023."
The library coordinates the delivery of the letters, collecting them at a central location and regularly sending a box of letters to their New Zealand partners to distribute. Then they handle distribution of the return letters to Delaware participants. Ten Delaware branches and 12 New Zealand branches participate in the exchange
Kent County Library also notes, "We have also seen a huge amount of interest from other libraries wanting to start a similar program, so we are trying to make international connections that will lead to |
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more programs such as this. To that end, we started a Facebook Group with FAQs and information for those interested in joining."
| Read more about this epistolatory library program |
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Featured Virginia Programs
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Waynesboro Public Library
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Street Arts Walking Tour
This roughly 2-2.5 mile guided walk through downtown Waynesboro focusing on the local art was a collaboration between the library and the city's tourism department. There were 13 art stops ranging from large murals to historical signs. We also take a small break about towards the end at the Farmer's Market. While we walk up the main street, I point out local businesses where you can get a delicious bite or buy a trendy outfit.
The walk ends in the middle of the shops right around lunchtime and I always encourage popping into one of the small museums or cafes for a bite to eat. |
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For more info, contact Rachel McDowell, mcdowellra@ci.waynesboro.va.us
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Central Rappahannock Regional Library
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The Fredericksburg Branch of the Central Rappahannock Regional Library recently completed a five-year project to publish a book.
Ruth Coder Fitzgerald, a noted local scholar of African American history, wrote a juvenile novel about a free Black girl living in 1832 Fredericksburg. Not published before the author’s death, the manuscript was discovered among some of Fitzgerald’s papers being sold at auction. Recognizing a possible treasure, the person who found the manuscript contacted our Virginiana Room. Our staff contacted the author’s daughter, Becca, who gave the rights to publish the book to the library. From there, the library secured a grant from the Community Foundation of the Rappahannock River Region to publish the book. We worked with a copy editor to help fill in the gaps, modernize the language, and polish the book.
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The library hired a local Black artist to create the wonderful cover art and asked Fredericksburg City Schools Superintendent Dr. Marceline Catlett to write the introduction. Library staff formatted the manuscript and cover, then published the book, Rachel’s Dream, through Kindle Direct Publishing. In November we held an incredibly successful book launch party with almost 100 people from the community coming out to celebrate the book. We’re currently working on getting the books into some local shops to sell and into the schools for the children in our community to read. The journey to completion was longer than expected due to COVID and other unforeseen factors, but the publishing experience itself was fairly straightforward and feasible for other libraries considering publishing projects.
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For more info, contact Erin Creighton, erin.creighton@crrl.org
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Recent articles on topics of interest to Adult Services |
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