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November 2023 |
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Adult Services Notes |
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Library of Virginia Training |
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The Library of Virginia offers a robust collection of resources to support genealogists, local historians, students, and scholars. Many of these collections can be accessed online without coming to Richmond.
The fall/winter Get the Most Out of LVA series connects you with the resources you need to help your patrons access and use LVA collections from their homes or local library.
Find all the program descriptions and registration information on the LDND Info Center's CE pages. |
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News from Library Development & Networking
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Art + Library = Vibrant Communities |
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Are you interested in arts-centric state grants and how they can serve as a catalyst for your library's arts and cultural initiatives? The Virginia Commission for the Arts (VCA) understands that when the arts and libraries collaborate, our communities thrive in richness and depth.
Please join us for a virtual information session to discover the VCA grants available to libraries to foster vibrant communities across the state.
Monday, November 13, 10-10:30 am |
Register Today |
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Would your library benefit from having more employes with basic Spanish language skills? If so, Transparent Language, part of the Find It VA collection made possible by the Library of Virginia, can help.
Survival Spanish for Librarians is available as a self-guided course in Transparent Language Online. Once you are logged in to Transparent Language from your library's website, you can find the class by selecting Spanish (Latin American) as your learning language, then navigating to the Browse tab and scrolling down to the Survival Spanish for Librarians link.
The course offers four "dialogue-based lessons that prepare librarians for basic library functions in Spanish, including getting a library card, checking out materials, providing computer services, and answering phone calls. Each lesson has about 10 new vocab items (words, phrases, and sentences) and takes about 30-45 minutes to complete."
From there, you could move on to the full Spanish class if you wish, but Survival Spanish for Librarians would be a great start for public services staff who want to better serve the library's Spanish-speaking community. |
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Recent Training: Community Collaboration
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You want to start or revive your library's community partnerships and relationships. But how can you build deep, authentic partnerships, especially with communities who aren't using the library now? In this webinar series, you will learn a transformational approach to building and sustaining relationships that creatively respond to community needs and aspirations.
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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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RUSA Online Training Reports
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In partnership with ALA's Reference and User Services Association, LDND is delighted to offer training opportunities for Virginia library staff. This year, we awarded 50 seats in RUSA online training classes.
Scholarship recipients are asked to report out on key points or topics. Read the most recent reports below.
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Libraries and Aging 101
Lauren Furey, Newport News Public Library; Katarina Spears, James L. Hamner Public Library; Rachael Phillips, Augusta County Library; Kimberly Bridges, Henrico County Public Library
The class led to interesting discussions and opportunities for networking which I always appreciate. Also:
I thoroughly appreciated the feedback given for the assignments by the leader.
I appreciated the "new to me" way of looking at how to plan, overall, specific programming for adults, particularly "Seasoned Patrons."
I printed out the majority of the linked information to have actual hard copies to share with coworkers and to also use as our own personal programming library to inspire and offer guidance and encouragement to my colleagues. Many are less experienced and hesitant and haven't had decades of experience.
It was interesting to dive into our strategic plan as well as our website to see what we are (and aren't) saying about that specific community which I happen to be a member of.
I was able to utilize some of my experience from being in charge of Senior Services at the LGBT Life Center and bring in some of those documents to my work.
It was fun and always interesting!
There was a lot of information to digest in Libraries and Aging 101 and I am still wading through some of the material to think through how our small but mighty library can better engage our senior population. With a FTE staff of only five to serve our county of 13,469 people, 17% of whom are under the age of 18, we have to do a lot of juggling of our duties, but there are organizations who already engage the senior population who can help us make some big strides.The most significant takeaways I had from the workshop series are:
Our community is small but spread out and was traditionally an agricultural community of family farms. Few working farms remain and most middle-aged adults who reside in the county commute into nearby urban centers for work. In an effort to preserve the rural traditions and history of the county, the library has been planning an oral history project in partnership with the local historical society. This is a great project to engage our senior population of residents who grew up in the county and after learning about “Older Americans Month” in the Aging 101 course we have decided to launch the public portion of the oral history project to coincide with the month of recognition in May 2024.
Older Americans Month is led by a government agency and there are graphics and promotional tools available through the Administration for Community Living. We’ll be able to use these resources to highlight our celebration of our older county residents and, at the same time, enlist them to help us in a broad project to preserve the county’s history.
Something else I was previously unaware of was the Older Americans Act (OAM) of 1965, which established funding for a number of federal initiatives to serve senior Americans. It makes sense, of course, that OAM established these funding programs with money distributed to the states for local and regional service organizations to provide social, nutritional, and health programs to seniors. I had just never heard of the Act itself or how that funding distribution worked. Though we can’t access funding from the OAM directly, we can still benefit from the programs it does fund.
Our county is so small that we are served by a regional senior resources center (under the aegis of the state agency on aging) and the training inspired me to reach out to them to find out how they serve seniors in our county. As it turns out, 288 seniors in our county (population 13,469) receive home meal delivery and another ~100 benefit from local programs such as transportation assistance and social programs. Based on this data, we are currently exploring options for making library services accessible to these homebound individuals. The weekly “Friendship Café” that provides social opportunities for seniors will be our first foray into providing mobile library services. A library staff member will attend the Café with a selection of library materials for browsing and circulation and we can allow attendees to bring their returns to the Café and fulfill holds through delivery. Eventually we would like to offer truly mobile library services to homebound individuals in the county, but for now this is a great start. Many of the seniors who attend the Café rely on transportation provided by the senior resource center so this helps to overcome the hardship of getting a ride to and from the library when a trip to the doctor’s office, hair salon, or grocery store might be more pressing.
Some of the recommendations made in the program or in ALA materials, such as having a dedicated staff person for senior programming, are just not feasible with our small staff and the demands of our student population, but we are trying to be more thoughtful about the opportunities we provide to our senior residents. I did fairly terribly on the “What do you believe about older adults?” quiz. I think I got a 36 our of 50, but my parents are 80 and 82 so I was basing my answers on personal experience.
Thanks for the opportunity to access all of these great resources!
The United States has an aging population. Currently, there are approximately 74.6 Million adults over 60 in the US, which is projected to increase to 82.3 million by 2040.
Adoption of technology by older adults is on the rise, but is dependent on household income and still lags behind younger demographics.
Once online, older adults engage at high levels
Increased social isolation during the covid pandemic had negative impacts on health, particularly for adult adults. To combat this:
Encourage the embrace technology
Leverage established partnerships, organizations, and support systems
Translate lessons learned during shutdowns to providing continued support to homebound individuals
It’s important to make sure to include older adults when creating strategic plans, programming and service surveys, etc.
Communication with these patrons is critical to ensuring that services, collections, and programs are aligned with needs.
The opportunity to take the “Libraries and Aging 101: Educate, Engage, and Empower Mature Adults” course provided enrolled students, including myself, with a step-by-step, process-oriented understanding on how to start, or improve, the planning process of library programs for older adults. The coursework began with tools and introductory exercises on how to locate and interpret local Census data, gave current research about aging adults, and provided links to resources for Older Americans Month (OAM) in May (see the Administration for Community Living webpage on OAM).
Tips for assessing the needs and interests of older adults in the local community were also included. Three ideas in particular were highlighted: using individual surveys, forming focus groups, and interviewing key stakeholder for their perspectives.
Information about developing basic logic models for program planning was presented, and while the logic models do take extra time to fully complete, they will help library staff clearly think through the “who, what, where, why’s and how’s” of a proposed program. Once completed, I found that logic models provide both a useful gathering place for all information needed to answer questions about how a program fits a library’s goals and mission, and address practical concerns such as meeting space, supplies, equipment, and necessary funding.
Each participant was assigned the task of proposing and planning a program for older adults, and I fully hope to implement the one I used for this exercise. This actionable part of the course was particularly helpful, as was the student discussion forum which focused on local experiences, ideas, and questions. The RUSA Guidelines for Library Services with 60+ Audiences: Best Practices and ALA Keys to Engaging Older Adults, were two resources referenced by the course instructor. Both documents will be shared and discussed with Adult Services staff at my library location.
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Dollar General Literacy Foundation |
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The Dollar General Literacy Foundation offers grants in several areas literacy.
The grants "support programs in Dollar General hometown communities" that provide opportunities for in need of literacy training and can be used to support new or expanding programming, technology and software, and/or materials purchases. |
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Readers' Advisory Tips and Tricks
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Connecting with readers where they already are is a great opportunity to build the community of readers. The library catalog is the one place that almost all library users go, even if they only set foot in the building to pick up holds.
Incorporating readers’ advisory tools in the catalog increases opportunities to interact with readers and enhance the reading experience. If you have online RA content like booklists, reviews, blog posts, book videos, discussion guides, etc. you should consider linking these in the appropriate catalog records.
Talk to your catalogers about using the MARC 856 field to add links to records and using the MARC 800 and 830 fields to enter series notes. And be sure to check with your systems admin to make sure that these fields are displaying in the user side of the catalog.
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As part of the Find It VA NoveList subscription, another option you have is to connect your NoveList instance to your catalog, so that users can quickly see if titles discovered in NoveList are available at your library. There are three options available, and our NoveList rep, Kellen Pecuch, KPecuch@ebsco.com, can answer questions and help you get set up.
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Mock Citizenship Naturalization Interviews
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The San José Public Library offers one-on-one mock citizenship interview similar those given to candidates for U.S. citizenship.
The project is collaboration with the local immigration office, who trained library staff to use the N-400 form, reading and writing vocabulary, and civics questions to prepare candidates for the citizenship exam.
Read more about this innovative project. |
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Featured Virginia Programs
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Lonesome Pine Regional Library
| Spinning the Yarn Mini-Festival |
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The Scott County Public Library of the Lonesome Pine Regional Library System recently hosted a Spinning the Yarn Mini-Festival that included yarn bombing the outside of the library with knit and crochet items, a rotating lineup of authors to hold readings and book talks, a musician to play to the outdoor crowd, and free knit and crochet classes for the duration of the event. Items for the yarn bombing were donated from the library’s monthly crochet class and members of the community.
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For more info, contact Shannon Steffey, ssteffey@lprlibrary.org
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Jefferson-Madison Regional Library
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Participants knit or crochet while listening to and discussing true crime. Library staff pre-selects a "menu" of true crime podcasts and lets participants choose what to listen to as a group. We also provide knitting instruction and a set of simple patterns along with needles and yarn, and sometimes we even have the first few rows already knitted onto needles to make it easier for the participant to begin the project. Most of our participants bring something their already working on, but beginners can use these resources to get started. True crime and mystery recommendations are frequently discussed between podcasts, and we highlight the newest additions to the library collection in these genres. The program is once a month, geared to folks ages 16+. We have from 10-20 participants each time.
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For more info, contact Britt Ford, bford@jmrl.org
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| Recent articles on topics of interest to Adult Services |
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